RepRap Huxley Cooling Fans
They say one of the first thing people do when they get a 3D printer is improving it. I guess that's true…
As I wrote last week, a fan for cooling the printed parts is essential when printing bridges, overhangs or just smaller parts. Until now I had some temporary fan salvaged from an old CPU. It worked but needed constant adjustments and had to turned on manually instead being controlled via g-code.
So I began my quest to add some cooling fans directly to the Huxley's design.
The first question was if the Huxley's electronics can control a fan. After some discussion in the eMaker forums it turned out that at least the RepRapPro version with the Sanguinololu electronics does have the fan control built in by default.
A fan can connected to the outer pins of the connector marked “PWR2/Bed”, just between the power connector to the right and the hotend connector to the left (See photo).
For mounting the fan to the Huxley I found a nice and simple solution at thingiverse: eMaker Huxley Part Cooling Fan Mount by “richgain”.
This works great, but blows air towards the print from one side only. This wasn't good enough for certain prints I tried. I needed airflow from the other side as well.
The cool thing about richgain's solution is that the fan moves up and down with the x-axis and thus always points to the top layer. I wanted this for the other side of the print, too. This meant I needed some solution to mount a fan on the x-motor side.
After some thinking I had an idea of a bracket reaching above the x-motor. Now I just needed to model it. I made my first attempts in FreeCad which started out good but then the darn application kept crashing and I gave up.
Instead I tried Tinkercad, a WebGL based, simple CAD tool that works directly in the browser. It's really easy to use and 15 minutes later I got my model.
Details for using the mount bracket are available at Thingiverse now.
This means I published my first thing on Thingiverse and my printer now has a dual cooling system controlled via gcode. Excellent 