Digital filament odometer.
Where can I find out more about this?
@Ray_Davis I made this using an Arduino and a few components. Have a few minor things to do still, but getting there.
What sort of sensor are you using? Does it require touching the filament or is it using some kind of optical sensor?
Using a quadrature encoder?
I was thinking about something similar, however I use astroprint/OctoPrint on a Raspberry PI so was thinking about using that and possibly having it stop the print if filament feed wasn’t detected. I was going down the route of non touch sensors such as those found in optical mice, I haven’t done any testing to see if they would detect filament movement yet (being they are often clear/shiny etc. and so likely wouldn’t work), so wondered what you were using and its accuracy.
Really cool, but why? Doesn’t the firmware track this already?
The length on a spool varies a lot by material density and actual diameter…
I have also been using the octoprint print stats / history plugin and that is great.
@Ray_Davis you are correct, it’s optical. Infra red led and a phototrasistor. The encoder wheel sits on a small bearing and the part that touches the filament has a rubber band to help with grip.
@Ryan_Carlyle I have to store my filament, I live close to the sea and have a fish tank. Found that my filament is ruined after a day if standing out. So now I store it in air tight bags. I want to use this just to measure set lengths of what I need to print.
1 day?!? What kind of filament and what’s your rh%? Nylon can saturate in 18-24 hours, but most aren’t that hygroscopic.
@Taylor_Landry I use PLA and ABS. I live in Cape Town with a rh% avg of about 80%. I have found that prints do not look very good when I use filament I left out and had much more extruder blocks.