I'm building n enclosure for my Printer, so I have some quick questions

So, after having the hotbed terminal on my control board overheat and melt , I'm ordering a new one and I have decided to build an enclosure out of Lexan and Aluminum angle. Given that the problem was caused by too much current being drawn to keep the hot bed up to temperature, I am curious about whether there are any ceramic heaters with thermostats that I could use to heat a roughly 4.5 cubic foot area?
How should I ventilate the enclosure?
Does anybody have any other good tips?
For other info, I have a Raspberry Pi running Octopi. It is also in a well ventilated, but very cold in the winter room.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/09/2016 11:38PM by DW77.

My printer has about 4.5 cuft enclosure and heats to 45C by the bed heater without any supplemental heating. 45-50C is sufficient to prevent delamination of ABS prints. The bed heater is a 450W unit. If the enclosure is made of insulating materials instead of lexan, you may not need supplemental heat. You can build the walls from foam insulation board and use one piece of lexan for one side or even just a window. If the temperature doesn't get high enough you can then add additional heat. Use a small, cheap room heater to heat the enclosure- bypass it's own thermostat and use the controller board PID controller to operate it.

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]

Depending on what electronics and firmware you use, you may be able to assign one of the heater/thermistor channels in the electronics to the chamber heater, with standard PID or bang-bang control, and use the M141 gcode command to set the chamber temperature. You can use a DC-AC SSR to control the mains-voltage heater from the output of the electronics.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

For ventilation you could run a tube out of the enclosure and out of the building, but there are another couple of threads on here discussing filtration and air recirculation from the top of the enclosure through filters/carbon and back in at the bottom. This helps keep the temperature even and might clear fumes and particulates but this is yet to be determined.

If you can keep your electronics and motors out of the enclosure that's ideal, but its rarely easy or even possible. At 45 degC it's not really a big problem if the electronics are well cooled (you could bring cold air in from outside the enclosure), the motors will be fine they're rated for much higher temperatures.

I recently built an enclosure and it has a large positive effect on print quality, noise and fumes.

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/11/2016 03:05PM by DjDemonD.

Also, coat the inside of the enclosure with aluminium foil for dat sweet IR reflectivity.

I've recently fitted a mirror at the back of my enclosure as you cannot get that all round visibility you get with an open printer. It also looks great with some led lighting strips in the enclosure.

Quote
dc42
Depending on what electronics and firmware you use, you may be able to assign one of the heater/thermistor channels in the electronics to the chamber heater, with standard PID or bang-bang control, and use the M141 gcode command to set the chamber temperature. You can use a DC-AC SSR to control the mains-voltage heater from the output of the electronics.

sorry for hijacking another thread but is it possible with the duet and ur latest firmware ? Cause i am planning an enclosure and i have some heater ( 60 w ) laying around . so it would be a good thing to know .

RRF and thus the Duet have this built in

I'm using an infrared ceramic heater normally used for heating reptile cages. It uses a standard light socket, and is available in all kinds of wattages. I have a Prusa i3 and 200W works fine. I had two of these in my chamber when I'm printing polycarbonate. I've had to convert most of the ABS components to polycarbonate to keep them from melting. I also lined the interior of my chamber with drywall (it is highly fire retardant) to insulate the box. I have no ventilation for the chamber, but put a 5" muffin fan inside of the enclosure to keep the temperature uniform throughout.

A 150W heater probably wouldn't need a thermostat, but you can buy cheap temperature controllers off of ebay that come with an SSR. They do the trick nicely, and you can tie it to a pin on your controller to activate it only when you are printing.


Don

I built an enclosure for my Printrbot Metal Plus. It works very well at keeping the noise down (so printing doesn't wake my baby), but there's a downside from the high ambient temperature inside. If I'm printing with a high bed temperature the filament becomes softer, sometimes leading to extruder jams (around the drive gear, a little like with flexible filaments). That might have been fixed with my new extruder (I'm not sure as my printer's still not set up after a recent house move), but it's something to be aware of.

I only have one nozzle, so am using nozzle #2 and the M141 H2 S50 command to set the chamber temperature to 50'C for ABS.
So far I have controlled a fan using this.
The chamber temps appear on the web interface.

I plan to use this heater, maybe on 5V to heat up a collapsible cloche enclosure.
At 12V its rated at 150W, that's a whopping 12.5 Amps !
So at 5V should be 5.2A.
At 3.3V it should be 3.4A, giving about 40W of heat. More compatible with nozzle heater cartridge currents I have measured.
Otherwise use an external TO220 power FET or SSR

I have an ATX PC PSU , so plenty of amps available at 12/5/3.3V
I plan to power up the duet micro with the 5V standby, and use the ATX Power On/Off switch on the web interface.

[www.maplin.co.uk]


[www.primrose.co.uk]

or something with a zipper door.

I think the second fan output is proportional on Duet 0.8.5 ? (PWM Fans FAN1 on the silkscree)
I may wish to reduce fan flow of the enclosure fan to a slight breeze, rather than a gale at 12V
It would be great to see a second fan slider control on the web interface.


Found this
M106 P1 H-1

Edited 7 time(s). Last edit at 02/13/2016 01:02PM by JuJuDelta.