FEATURE REQUESTS
Smart Controller Cooling:
A feature that would give one the ability to activate and deactivate a pin based on the state of the the drivers and heater. Marlin has a feature like this where one can activate a GPIO (thus a fan) when ever a heater or motor driver is enabled. One can also specify how long the fan should remain on after the drivers or heaters are disabled. I have been told on one of the fourms/channels that this would not be difficult to implement and could be configured similer to the tempreture module. I just lack the expertise to do it.
Idle/Sleep mode:
This may be a bit more difficult to implement. A sleep mode where the printer goes into a sleep state after a time of inactivity has passed. So no activity from a print, user input or uart comms. This would be amazing as it would allow one to deactivate things such as motors or lights. This would be to save energy but mostly on printers where there are LED strip lights or chamber fans these can be deactivated after say 20 min or inactivity.
Imported from wikidot
You can do board temp control right now. Just imagine your board is a hotend, where the pcb is the heater ( so locate the thermistor there ) and the fan is the heating element ( so wire it the same way ), and it’ll work out of the box ( just invert the output with a “!” modifier so the fan is on when it’s too hot instead of when it’s too cold )
I have seen this idea as well but It is not ideal. One can only monitor one thing/heat source at a time. So this does not work if for example you want to monitor a heat sink on the drivers, another on the FETs and a third on external drivers. At the moment I am just using the hotend temps as the tempreture switch for this fan but this is not ideal. This also kills a thermistor port for a simple function. For example, I have 2 hotends and a large bed. I have put 2 thermistors in my bed as a safety feature in case one fails or one of the heaters fails and there is a large tempreture gradient across the bed, this leaves me with no spare thermistor pins anyway.
Well no software feature is going to get you more than 4 thermistor inputs … that limit is there no matter what.
I think it’s very unlikely someone will bother to code a module for this, as temperaturecontrol does the job, and 99+% of users will just leave cooling fans on all the time if they need them.