Well when you’re talking about extreme overhangs, you might need extreme process control.
Even if it just pushed reliable printing forward incrementally and helped reliability, it would be worth it. I’m not shooting for the stars, just brainstorming about ways to overcome typical problems we all encounter. The big problems are solved, so time to drill down on untouched issues. I see cooling as a problem in all sorts of scenarios. It’s a solvable problem.
@Brook_Drumm something about this infrared camera concept has really tickled my brain, it has all sorts of potential advantages.
It could firstly potentially solve the ‘is this layer ready for the next layer’ through averaging thermal readings, but also could report all sorts of other good things like ‘is the bed evenly up to temperature’ and also ‘whoah! do we have thermal runaway in the bed/head?!’.
It would need it’s own control board at that point I think as it would need openCV or similar to understand what it was looking at, but it’s an intriguing concept.
(apologies for stealing the thread @Kevin_Danger_Powers )
@Mr_Bonce it’s all good. It’s been interesting to read.
I love those ideas! Safety, alone, is a great point. Also, we could compensate for beds reading the wrong temperature, check the external hotend temperature… the one I’m wondering about is if there is an automatic extrusion speed test that could find the upper limit of what volumetric flow the hotend is capable of so it never tries to go that speed. This is getting off topic (from an already off topic thread 
but when I’m printing large layer heights, these problems are actually very very frustrating… warp, shrinkange, layer adhesion, hotend performance mysteries… all get very expensive. Perhaps the infrared camera idea has real value for very large, very expensive prints. Which would justify the cost, btw. It’s the big parts that are difficult. Scientifically studying how large prints cool could dramatically improve success rates.
One other fun idea: IR camera + heated bed w zones that can be switched off if not needed… after a few minutes of printing, unneeded heat zones are switched off
In a chocolate print… auto cooling would allow you to print a lot more models than you could without it!
Brook