3D Printer Enclosure

Personal Projects
1

I want to be able to print with ABS, ASA, and maybe eventually PC on my respectably modified Ender 3 (I know) without giving me or my cat permanent brain/lung damage.

I haven’t been the greatest on documentation for this one. But essentially, here is the checklist I have:

  1. Design and build the box

This was done in FreeCAD in June-July '23. I built it out of wood furring, 3/4" plywood for the base, 1/8" plywood for the back and top, and clear polycarbonate for the door and sides. I filled the inside with copious amounts of silicone caulking. Maybe overkill, but it’ll help me sleep at night.

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Above, the partially-completed box with what may appear to the untrained eye to be a 3D printer. It is actually my cat.

  1. Implement adequate ventilation that can be opened and closed to the outdoors

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I made some custom parts on the aforementioned printer, including a duct section with a 90-degree bend in it, with room for a PC fan (to be run after a print), as well as a wall mount. The wall mount is just mounted to some MDF I found at my school’s senior design lab. The interface to the box has a place to mount a shutter later, so that I can remotely open and close the enclosure to the outdoors when a print ends or starts. You may be thinking that the prints might be a bit porous. Obviously, with the lengths I went with the caulking, this is a weak spot. You might be right. YOLO.

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The outside of the back of the enclosure is shown with the 90-degree duct containing the fan.

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The inside of the back of the enclosure, where you can see the fan behind the stationary part of the shutter.

  1. The shutter (I’m here now)

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The shutter is to be controlled by an ATMega328P connected to my OctoPi (A Raspberry Pi 3 running OctoPrint). The shutter is turned by a little stepper motor I got off of some 2D printer I took apart years ago. Nominally, it runs on 24 volts, but I’ve tested it and I think I can get away with 12 volts. True, the Ender 3 runs on 24 volts, but I need to drive the fan with 12 volts anyway, so I might as well underdrive the motor as well. I’ll do this with a PC power supply most likely.

I have the shutter designed, printed, and mounted on the motor, the mount to the inside of the enclosure likewise completed, and a plated perfboard halfway completed for the ATMega328 and motor driver ICs. I considered programming the ATMega328 on bare metal, but I’m familiar with Arduino, and I just want to see this thing working. Maybe later.

The code is in progress.

I’m content with this little bit of documentation I have up even if nobody reads it. It’s a start!

If anyone does see this, though, I would appreciate thoughts and feedback!

2

Welcome @psampson !

How are you making Octopi talk to the Arduino? Are you writing your own custom plugin?

3

Here’s my modest attempt at an enclosure. YMMV

-Chris

4

modest? :wink:

Shame the gasket idea didn’t fully pan out.

5

Nice Chris!

The aluminum extrusion would have been a good idea. Oh well, so far the printer hasn’t threatened spontaneous combustion, although adding relay control to the 24v supply might be prudent. I have a camera always watching the system, and I tend to check in on it periodically while it prints, so being able to completely turn off the high-power stuff remotely would give me some ease of mind.

@Parker_Dillmann I’ll probably write my own plugin to send commands to the Arduino with the GPIO UART on the Pi, although I haven’t written code for the OctoPrint ecosystem yet. It looks like the documentation is excellent. I’ll have a go sometime this week.

6

Thanks. Yeah, I don’t know how serious the fire issue is. Maybe I was being overly cautious, and my friend who made me aware of this hazard went overboard. I also had in the back of my mind that I purchased one of the cheaper Chinese printers out there, and didn’t have a great feeling that fire safety was a top consideration in its design and manufacturing. If I had a higher quality printer from a reputable company, I think I would worry less.

Funny thing, despite also having an OctoPrint RP4 with a camera watching the print, I still don’t feel comfortable leaving the house with it running. Maybe if I got one of those ball fire extinguishers I’d rest easy.

Yeah, the camera is great because I can leave the room and view it from anywhere in the house on a computer or my phone (there’s an app for that).

I like your exhaust fitting design. That’s been on my to-do list for ever. I just don’t print enough nor print using serious fume emitting filaments to worry yet. I have installed my printer next to a window so routing a duct would be straightforward if that becomes a concern. I’d probably send one of those glass panels back to the shop and ask them to cut a hole (or maybe just buying a new pane with hole would be cheaper)

-Chris

7

Given that my current 3D printer at home is starting to give off “burning” smells I would say having caution of fire hazard is warranted. Also, I am pushing this printer way beyond the temperatures it was originally designed to print for and its been almost non stop printing for 6 years might also be the reason :wink:

8

I’d look more into that fire board that I describe in my project text. Being in the US, you may be able to source it at a not-crazy cost. And while glass is nice for a printer enclosure, you don’t really need all 5 sides to be glass.

Also there could be different levels of worry, depending on where your printer is located — in a room in your house, in a garage, or a free-standing shed in the back yard.