CORE XY Enclosure

I have just built an enclosure for my CoreXY printer.

I used 16mm thick MDF (Fibre wood) sheets with two 10mm thick polycarbonate doors.

My power supply sucks in air from outside of the enclosure and the bulk of the air is expelled outside of the enclosure. A small amount of air goes from the power supply into the enclosure and there is a small fan which expells air from a box which houses the Ramps PCB.
Still need to make an air chute from the power supply directly to the ramps box.
I don’t think this will increase enclosure temperature by anything much.

I have found that when printing with ABS with my heat bed at 90C, I get a temperature at the top inside of my enclosure of approx 35C and at the bottom approx 31C. I do have a end of print cooling fan which would properly even out the temperatures if I turned it on, however this would reduce the temperature at the print area.

I’m thinking that the only way to increase the enclosure temperatures is to use an additional heater as there’s not enough room to add insulation to the inside of my enclosure.

Overall I am happy with the reduced noise, less smell, more constant temperature around the printer, also keeps filament drier and keeps dust out of the printer.

Bulky/medium to large ABS prints will delaminate unless you get the enclosure temperature up to 45-50C.

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

Thanks Digital Dentist,

Just added an air chute for the cooling of the Ramps PCB. The temperature in the enclosure only increased a couple of degrees to approx 38C.

I have found so far with having an enclosure at a temperature of 38C that I am getting a lot better quality of print with larger parts,
The filament is being extruded more evenly, not sure whether this because with my design that the whole roll of ABS is within the enclosure or that I am printing within a heated enclosure.
Basically my filament has already been preheated before entering the print heat which may reduce friction within the hot end/tube assembly.


Will have a play with adding an additional heater with thermostat get another 10 degrees, will also need another power source as my printer (Game PC one) is near its max output.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Cheers REPROT - .Rotorua, New Zealand.

Check out ceramic heaters.... That's what I plan on using, and then control it via a cheap thermostat or rig it to your electronics with its own relay. They get very hot, so will need some sort of protection but otherwise they are a relatively safe heating method. Often used in electric radiators and space heaters and also used in the reptile industry. Can be plugged into a light bulb socket, or you can buy units with wires on. They heat the air very efficiently, and can be bought in a range of wattages. 100-150W will likely suffice, but luckily they are cheap enough that you can experiment with them.

Ceramic bulb
Ceramic panel

Thanks Origamb,

Looking at using one of theses 12v 60W heaters. Plan to use a 12VAC supply and use Marlin firmware by enabling another extruder (only using 1 at present) to control the enclosure temperature and hopefully display the temperature on my 4 x 16 LCD.

Been printing a few objects and the enclosure has been getting up to 40C after a short time.
What I need is something to get the temperature up a bit higher and quicker (about same time as it takes the heat bed to get up the temperature) and keep it stable.
60W is half of the rating of the print bed so hopefully it will do the job without being an overkill and should be easy to mount within my printer and I should have enough room to mount a small transformer to power it and a solid state relay.

Thanks for your help as it lead me to find this heater.

Cheers REPRAP.

Quote
RepRot
Thanks Origamb,

Looking at using one of theses 12v 60W heaters. Plan to use a 12VAC supply and use Marlin firmware by enabling another extruder (only using 1 at present) to control the enclosure temperature and hopefully display the temperature on my 4 x 16 LCD.

Been printing a few objects and the enclosure has been getting up to 40C after a short time.
What I need is something to get the temperature up a bit higher and quicker (about same time as it takes the heat bed to get up the temperature) and keep it stable.
60W is half of the rating of the print bed so hopefully it will do the job without being an overkill and should be easy to mount within my printer and I should have enough room to mount a small transformer to power it and a solid state relay.

Thanks for your help as it lead me to find this heater.

Cheers REPRAP.

I highly doubt that will get to temps as fast as your bed, perhaps with the two combined it'l be alright. That thing barely has more power then the heater cartridge in your hotend! A standard PCB heater is 150w I believe.

also be warned about running more stuff through ramps. A heated bed usually is enough to overload ramps, let alone another heater. I'd highly suggest a relay, even if you do decide on a low voltage heater. Saying that though you can probably get the temperature up in your enclosure a bit more just by efficiently sealing and insulating it.

EDIT: I just had a thought that you really need a heater that is able to adequately heat the enclosure, regardless of heated bed otherwise you will not be able to control the heat very well. For example, if your bed and enclosure heater turned off at the same time the temp may drop quickly and then struggle to climb again. expect to see heating errors a lot on marlin. An overpowered heater would keep it at stable temps easily. If you are not comfortable with a relay, buy a mains powered on/off thermostat. You can get them for £20~.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/09/2017 03:49AM by Origamib.

Hi Origamib,

I think you are right 60 watt heater won't be enough.

The heat bed is rated at 150W and the print head 40W, which means 190W of power being used when first warming up the heat bed and hot end. (Different temperatures for both heaters)
I would expect approximately about 60%- 80% of this 190W being used to keep temperatures up when printing (Approx 115W - 150W).

I have a spare transformer (24vac 4 amp) and a solid state relay (20 Amp AC), just sourcing a 100w 6 ohm resistor ($1.40) and will give this a test.
Hopefully it will give some indication whether a 100 watt heater does anything much.
Aim - Increase warm up time of enclosure - Increase enclosure temperature up another 10 degrees C and keep temperature stable. Use existing Ramps to control and monitor enclosure temperature.
Option is still to be decided whether to use low voltage or 230VAC heater , all depends on heater wattage rating required. (Don't want a big transformer/power supply but still have it electrical safe)


- As far as using the ramps board, I am already using it for powering the hotend and heat bed which is the max for power output. (Also near max of power supply) and also using the other ramps MOSFET driver for a hot end cooling fan.
I am only planning on using Ramps PCB for enclosure temperature control -Temperature sensor input via I/O and use an I/O as an output which can drive the solid state relay (Connected to the transformer secondary winding).
I have used a solid state relay with a separate transformer to heat a heat bed with an earlier 3D printer using a Arduino Mega without a ramps PCB..

Not sure how I will get on with the Marlin firmware to allow warm up times without errors if using the second extruder temperature input. Only found one setting for both extruder warm up temperatures times.(shouldn't be an issue if warm up times are similar).
I have had a play with this setting on my old 3d printer which has an old Makerbot hotend which is slow to warm up, Earlier version firmware didn't monitor warm up time, when I updated I got errors as the hot end was too slow to warm up.
Was able to increase time rather than disabling this new feature which you don't really won't to do.
May need to have a look at the very latest Marlin version if I have issues with current version I am using. A bit of work to upgrade as I have made a number of changes with using dual Z axis with auto home syncing, additional LCD Menu options and M119-status changes.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Cheers RepRot

Hi
Maybe this is a silly comment but for what I understand, you try to cool the various electronic elements of your printer and in the meantime, you need to reach a high temperature for your print.
Why not simply put the PSU, ramps...outside the enclosure ? Doing so, the two fans that sucks and expell the air out and from your printer will not be necessary anymore....
Ben

Hi,

When I designed my printer I wasn't really planning too much on having an enclosure but had thought about it .
I used a PC style power supply which has one internal cooling fan and also boxed up the Arduino Meg and Ramps PCB which I added a small fan to keep the stepper drivers cool.

In the quest for improved prints and I also noticed the over the winter months I found print quality reduced with colder air. I decided on having an enclosure.
The easy way was just build a box that the whole printer could fit into and just add ducts to allow air cooling for the power supply and Ramp PCB's.
This still keeps everything very compact and should I need to preform any work on the printer I can just simply slide the whole printer out of the enclosure (A major plus).
As the PC power supply has a steel case there will be a slight heat loss for the enclosure due to the power supply cooling effect.
I don't see this as major loss as the type of PC power supply has an automatic temperature adjustable speed control for the fan.
Overall there is no air flow that is coming or going from the enclosure. The enclosure being made of a wood product and the doors made of polycarbonate act as a so so insulator.
My main aim is how best to increase the temperature an keep it stable within the enclosure.
To be able to have stable enclosure temperature, two options could have occurred - Over temperature (Requiring cooling) or Under temperature (Requiring additional heating).
- Appears I have the Under temperature option to deal with.

If designing another 3D printer I would definitely go for an enclosure and plan to have all the electronics (Power supply/Ramps) outside the heated enclosure (Properly below the printer).
Another thing, most power supplies need cooling, they are either designed small with a cooling fan or large with vent holes. Also stepper motor drivers will properly still need some cooling depending on how hard (fast) you wish to drive them.(You still need to consider air flow around all these components in any design).
A must would be to be able to access the printer for adjustments and repairs, thus the need for removable sides.


One of the reasons I have posted my work is that with many of the 3D printers out there don't have enclosures.
This gives people an option to have an enclosure by adding a box around and ensuring the electronics are keep cool, either by removing them from the enclosure or having them cooled with some form of air ducts.

While still working on increasing the enclosure temperature issue I am very pleased to have an enclosure with improved prints, reduced noise, less smell, no dust issues and being able to keep my filament very dry.

Cheers.....

I've had two enclosures one was a box over an i3 to keep it warm in my garage to print in winter. Worked fairly well but the enclosed area was quite large so I tried a element from an electronic heater, this was too radiative and heated up printed parts too much. Then I tried a hairdryer with its power output reduced using diodes. This worked better but was noisy.

My corexy has a laser cut acrylic enclosure designed in cad, which encloses just the build volume. It can get up to 50 degrees using just the bed heater when printing abs which enables me to print pretty much anything. Keeping the enclosure to just the build volume is more difficult but smaller volume so higher temp, and all the motors and electronics are out of the enclosure except my extruder motor as I'm using a titan now, but I was using a flex3drive so no motors inaide at all. I fitted a fan intending to control it thermostatically if it got too hot but now I only use it to cool the chamber after a print.

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Simon Khoury

Co-founder of [www.precisionpiezo.co.uk] Accurate, repeatable, versatile Z-Probes
Published:Inventions

I thought of using foldable shades to enclose the print area. The shades would expand with the bed frame going down, so the enclosed volume would be small in the beginning.
The corners are difficult to make airtight though, so I put the idea to sleep. Maybe have to look for an Origami-class to learn about folding techniques.

Yeah someone also suggested this for on top above the print head, two sets of folding blinds one for x and one for Y, in the end I just went with an acrylic box.

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Simon Khoury

Co-founder of [www.precisionpiezo.co.uk] Accurate, repeatable, versatile Z-Probes
Published:Inventions

[web.mit.edu]

[www.youtube.com]

[pheugo.com]

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

Thanks D_D for the bellows instructions. I can already see me lasercutting the patterns, created by a selfwritten calculator.

Further update....

Just added a 6 ohm 100w resistor to a heat sink and supplied it with 24VAC which gave me a 100 watt enclosure heater.
I had to run my bed fan (used for cooling down parts after print is finished) to dispense the heat from the heat sink.

I was able to get the temperature up to a max temperature of 50C by running the 100 watt heater continuously.
This gave me about 10C temp increase from not using the additional heater, however it still is very slow to get the enclosure up to this 50C temperature.
A lot has to do with the heat loss from my enclosure. Currently not wishing to add any additional insulation at this stage.

Now looking at replacing the 100w resistor with a 300 watt 230VAC cartridge heater, I will need to make a fitting to attach heater to the heat sink.
Due to power required will go with using 230VAC and use a solid state relay and have a thermostat for limiting max temperature should a fault occur. (Cooling fan or controller fault).
Planning to wire (230vac) directly into the PC type power supply (don’t have a lot of spare room). As the PC is soft start I will wire it to the 230VAC input and the solid state relay will act as the power turn on switch.

Will also use a temperature controller (using 12v) to control the 230VAC solid state relay. Temp controller ordered has a temperature set save option which should mean that I won’t have to keep setting the temperature each time I power up the printer. Controller has a mechanical relay but will properly disable this as the solid state relay will be doing the main current switching.

I have also looked at the version of Marlin I am using (Version 1.0.3 dev) and I can get an I/O output to when the heated bed has been enabled to function, This is not the signal to the Mosfet that turns the bed on and off .
Plan to use this I/0 output to auto switch the enclosure heater On/off and then let the temperature controller control the enclosure temperature.
Thus when printing is finished and the heat bed is turned off the enclosure heater will also be turned off.

Now awaiting parts to see if a 300w heater will do the job of heating my enclosure up quickly and to the correct temperature..

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Obtain a I/O signal from Ramps Board to Indicate Bed Temperature Set
Marlin Firmware Version: 1.0.3 DEV
Description: Add pin definition for I/O output for indication that heatbed has been turned ON
Marlin Sketch: Pins_RAMPS_13.h
Line 64
Add #define ENCLOSURE_PIN 1 // Assigns I/O D1 as an indicator of heat bed On/Off state - (Can be set to another I/O pin if required)


Marlin Sketch: Marlin_main.cpp
Line 3604
Add int ENCLOSURE = 0; // Asigns a variable for I/O pin

Line 3606
Add if (code_seen('S')&(code_value()>0)) WRITE(ENCLOSURE_PIN, HIGH); // Sets I/O pin to indicate Heatbed is On

Line 3607
Add if (code_seen('S')&(code_value()<1)) WRITE(ENCLOSURE_PIN, LOW); // Sets I/O pin to indicate Heatbed is OFF

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With the above added it should like this in Marlin_main.cpp:
/** * M140: Set bed temperature */
int ENCLOSURE = 0; // Asigns a variable for I/O pin
inline void gcode_M140() {
if (code_seen('S')) setTargetBed(code_value());
if (code_seen('S')&(code_value()>0)) WRITE(ENCLOSURE_PIN, HIGH); // Sets I/O pin to indicate Heatbed is On
if (code_seen('S')&(code_value()<1)) WRITE(ENCLOSURE_PIN, LOW); // Sets I/O pin to indicate Heatbed is OFF
}

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/11/2017 02:11AM by RepRot.

if (code_seen('S')&(code_value()>0)) .....

If you put this line only in M140 code segment, you won't be able to use M190 to switch.

Also the AC heater element gave me the creeps. It doesn't look particularly safe to me. Make sure, the heatsink has good isolation against the rest. Better route a wire to GND of the mains power.

Thanks o lampe,

Will look at adding changes for M190 as well.

I will be running an earth wire to the heat sink and an inline fuse (1.5amp) as well as some additional thermal type insulation (double insulation) around the heater leads to be on the safe side.
I believe these types of heaters are used with heated moulds, I have worked with similar heaters that were 110 VAC.
Did look at silicon mats heaters but they are rather large, and you still need to keep them well protected from physical abuse.

The 100w heater with fan running is getting up to 60C ... properly go for a thermal thermostat of about 150C but not to sure if this is too high at this stage, may need to do some testing once I have the 300w heater to work out what's the best protection.

May look at if its possible to do some additional protection using another unused hotend sensor if I can work around the heating up time monitoring part of the firmware, this would give some protection if the temperature controller fails and keeps heating up too much.
Don't think there's much protection you can do if the solid state relay shorts apart from the thermostat that I am adding.

Will look at drilling a 6mm hole in some pieces of aluminium and bolting this to the heat sink, making sure the heater can't slide out.

I normally use an RCD (residual current device) when testing out this type of circuit.


Thanks for your feedback, all helps with development of heated enclosures.

Cheers Reprot..

I built a 500W heater into the enclosure of a solidoodle printer and it got up to 50C in about 4 minutes- faster than the bed got to 105C to print ABS.

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

Thanks for the feedback digital dentist... looks as if I need something less than 500w but greater than 100w.. so will order a 300w heater and see how I go. Cheers