Finally a viable filament diameter sensor!
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Has anyone seen Thomas Sanladerer's video about filament diameter? He designed an ingenious magnet-based filament diameter sensor.
Basically, it uses a lever with a magnet on the end running against the filament and varying in distance from a hall effect sensor. He says it's quite repeatable and exceeded his expectations.
I wonder if it would make any print quality difference if you'd rig it up to adjust the extrusion settings as the filament is fed into the printer.
Anyway, it's a really cool video with a lot of engineering behind it. Check it out!
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it opens up the possibility to adjust the flow based on the reading.
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@Veti said in Finally a viable filament diameter sensor!:
it opens up the possibility to adjust the flow based on the reading.
Yeah. It just outputs the diameter over I2C. Unfortunately, he hasn't released the code yet, but he said he plans on making it open-source, and I'm sure he will soon!
I was surprised at how simple it is! There aren't any optics or expensive sensors as in some previous versions!
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Does it really makes sens to compensate for such small differences in diameter?
Frédéric
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we have accelerometer measuring of ringing in the hotend to tune it.
this is optimizing one more variable -
@Veti said in Finally a viable filament diameter sensor!:
we have accelerometer measuring of ringing in the hotend to tune it.
This sounds interesting! Do you have a link with more details?
@fma said in Finally a viable filament diameter sensor!:
Does it really makes sens to compensate for such small differences in diameter?
Realistically, probably not, but diameter consistency is one of the worst problems with dirt-cheap filament. I think it would be one step closer to making printers as reliable as toasters, for example.
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@JadonM said in Finally a viable filament diameter sensor!:
This sounds interesting! Do you have a link with more details?
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@fma said in Finally a viable filament diameter sensor!:
Does it really makes sens to compensate for such small differences in diameter?
really depends on the quality of the filament, and if the sensor can actually work out the cross section as opposed to a diameter.
i thought prusa's approach was to just tighten up the tollerances for the filament manufacturing?
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Here is actually using 3 sensors, in 45degrees steps. The auto compensation software may also need to know the filament length between each of the three sensors and the extruder and merge length shifted values to construct an estimation of the cross cut.
Considering the common tolerances of modern filament, I wonder if this complexity will result in a significant part improvement.
A simple way to test is to print 3 models with -2%, 0% and +2% from your current setting and see if the differences are significant.
Edit: regarding how useful it is, his magnetic strength based design is clever and cool.
