Most of my 3d printing failures or glitches have been caused by 2 things. Overextrusion, or a filament stoppage. I see it time and again across all 3d printer forums, people who have their filament set wrong, or tales of 20 hour prints failing on hour 21. and it’s something that I believe we have the technology to work around. I’ve been looking to add sensors to my 3d printer ever since I first started playing with the old AO-100. Only recently have some sensor pieces made their way to the market that can be adapted for use with a TAZ.
My goal is to measure the width of the incoming filament, determine if it is still present and moving, eventually determine how much plastic is still remaining on the filament spool, and allow the printer to account for ambient temperature and humidity. I also may want to do auto bed leveling stuff. At the moment, I don’t have a good solution for the temperature, humidity and filament weight / used requirements, but filament width and movement monitors do exist.
I plan to build a block that will replace the upper right hand filament feed tube guide, that will incorporate the Tunell labs Filament movement monitor, and the Optical filament width sensor created by flipper. I’m planning on monitoring a single filament at this point, mainly due to space and board header constraints. Filament will feed in from the primary spool, past the width sensor and into the motion sensor. The width sensor might be slightly more accurate closer to the print head itself, but that adds weight and complexity there, and the circuit board is fairly big. For my purposes, the filament I use is usually fairly uniform. I just forget to change the overall diameter, so I am ok with relying on a measurement several feet from the nozzle.
I also have bed leveling sensors, though both of them I have on hand at the moment appear to be the wrong type. I’m not sure I want to go with auto leveling yet, mainly because I am really pretty good at manually leveling the bed, and the way it is now I don’t have to wait for it to auto level before my print starts.
I figure at the same time I’m going to finally install the new hexagon hotend and the nozzle cleaning retrofit. I’m not going to use mini style leveling, but it would be nice to have a bit less gunk baked onto the nozzle.
So, that’s the plan so far. I don’t know how well, or even if it is going to work. But we’ll see how it goes!
Filament movement monitor
Fillament width Sensor