I made a short video of the filament odometry sensor (mounted in the filament pulling force sensor) of my Ultimate Filament Sensor actually working.
Whil at first I had too little friction, now it seems to count the filament just fine.
The force sensor is also meassuring realistic data.
The spool weight drifts for a while after sudden changes in stress but provides stable meassurements now.
This post has a timely appearance. I recently had a failed print because the filament ceased to feed. I don’t need so many of the amazing features you have incorporated, but your project certainly provides a good reference for me. You’ve created quite a sophisticated device!
Would you expect a similar construction would be possible, using the rotary encoder and an Arduino, with the sole objective of detecting lack of movement of the filament, thereby sounding a beep alarm?
My filament spools from the top of two inside mounted reels and I can envision a small tower above each filament entry point, which is located at the bottom of the reel and slightly forward. The filament would be guided over the detection wheel prior to entering the bowden tube.
Now that you’ve shown your project to me, the ideas have begun to flood my alleged mind.
I agree that the cost difference isn’t much. I lack the programming ability to accomplish much with the Pi and I don’t know how I’d manage to incorporate either design into my BCN3D Sigma printer. I will admit to having constructed an OctoPi/OctoPrint combination, but found no real use for it, perhaps until now.
Is it your opinion that it is likely possible to make use of the OctoPi in such a way as to have a movement detector cause my specific printer to pause the print and also sound a beep alarm?
I’m always impressed to see projects of your sort, even though I may be unable to duplicate or imitate the accomplishments.
You can use my existing plugin and just configure what pins the rotary encoder is connected to. The other two sensors should simply do nothing if the hardware is not present. It doesn’t do a sound (yet) because I have no hardware connected that could do any kind of sound. But it does inform me about the pause via Telegram including a camera image (so I can make an informed decition about resuming) and I can even resume using my phone from whereever I am if it turns out to be a false alarm.
Heck, if the printer is idle and I have an idea, I can even upload a file via Telegram and have the printer start working on it, so it’s ready when I get home.
I’m afraid that I am intimidated by the blog entries for the development of your device. Most of what I’ve read does not collect in my brain well enough that I could construct a successful bundle. Everything that I can make work has been turnkey or step-by-step, while your presentation is a very complex overview for someone like me.
I’ve been only partly successful with command line interactions, especially when the result of a specific command is an error message. Lacking linux skills is a certain disadvantage, obviously.
@Fred_U This is exactly what I think you’re asking for: https://www.toybuilderlabs.com/products/tunell-3d-printer-filament-monitor
Out of the box it pulls a pin high/low based on whether filament has been moving recently or not, which can trigger a pause on out of filament, jam, or tangle. Firmware support is pretty easy, it’s baked into some and not hard to add to others.
I have, umm, I think six or seven of them on printers.
It’s NOT ideal for Repetier, since Repetier takes a raw encoder signal and will do dynamic speed control to try to recover from lost filament motion.
Firmware support does mean that you can’t use the official firmware of your printer and have to maintain a patch for all eternity. Quote: “. I lack the programming ability to accomplish much”
and “Lacking linux skills”. So git, patching and testing a complex source code and most of all maintaining an Atmel or ARM crosscompoling toolchain would be too much compared to a python plugin that can be installed using a GUI.
@Marcus_Wolschon the benefit of just pulling a mainboard pin high/low with the filament monitor is that most firmwares already have the capability compiled in to use an external pause button, and that’s all you need. It’s one line in the text config file for Smoothie or RepRapFirmware. Sailfish has it by default. You do need to add a code snippet to Marlin, but just about everybody has to figure out how to clone and compile Marlin anyway, so it’s not much of a barrier.
Setting up a RasPi to do anything is pretty dang hard in comparison to pasting one line into a plaintext config file on an SD card.
@Ryan_Carlyle okay. I’m used to get my well tested firmware images for the Ultimaker supplied with Cura. I figured if programming is is not your skill, you’d choose a printer thats doesn’t require you to compile your own firmware.
@Marcus_Wolschon I’d imagine that the number of people willing to wire up custom hardware and put together an OctoPi with more than just the standard image, but not configure firmware, is a pretty small group. That said, it’s always good to have options, and I’m glad you’re working on this.
