filament vault
Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2018 10:18 pm
After discovering that opened filament stored in the garage absorbed moisture and produced crummy (term of art) prints, I diced around with how to keep it dry. As always most of the solution was readily available at home depot. I had read that a container with a 25 watt incandescent light bulb would do the trick, but that was too simple for me. I wanted to know what the humidity was in the 'vault'.
I bought a 'homer' bucket, a screw in lid, a standard light bulb socket and a 25 watt appliance light bulb.
I bought a "Hurrah" Feather micro controller (has wifi built in), a temp-humidity sensor, a Feather relay (for turning lightbulb on and off), and a Feather OLED display from the good lady at AdaFruit.com
I modified the Arduino code which Ms Ada publishes on her website so that I could read the temp and humidity and turn the light on and off from anywhere with internet access. And, Voila, it works. It can handle 3 spools at once and maybe if I replaced the desiccant tin with the little bags, I could get a fourth spool in there. It was able to restore a spool of ESun PLA to it's original condition (or close enough) which had been producing really ugly blistery prints.
The humidity sensor has a +/-3 percent accuracy, so i cannot know the specific humidity in the container. The light-bulb is sufficient to get the temperature in the bucket up to 115F. At 115F the relative humidity will get down to less than 5% which means something like 10% at normal room temperature. Cost was something like $70 for everything. it is controllable via io.adafruit.com web site where I constructed a 'dashboard' for viewing the humidity-temperature data stream and have a switch for turning the light-bulb on and off.
I'm probably going to add some automation to the code so that the bulb will come on for 24 hours anytimg the humidity in the container rises above 15%
I bought a 'homer' bucket, a screw in lid, a standard light bulb socket and a 25 watt appliance light bulb.
I bought a "Hurrah" Feather micro controller (has wifi built in), a temp-humidity sensor, a Feather relay (for turning lightbulb on and off), and a Feather OLED display from the good lady at AdaFruit.com
I modified the Arduino code which Ms Ada publishes on her website so that I could read the temp and humidity and turn the light on and off from anywhere with internet access. And, Voila, it works. It can handle 3 spools at once and maybe if I replaced the desiccant tin with the little bags, I could get a fourth spool in there. It was able to restore a spool of ESun PLA to it's original condition (or close enough) which had been producing really ugly blistery prints.
The humidity sensor has a +/-3 percent accuracy, so i cannot know the specific humidity in the container. The light-bulb is sufficient to get the temperature in the bucket up to 115F. At 115F the relative humidity will get down to less than 5% which means something like 10% at normal room temperature. Cost was something like $70 for everything. it is controllable via io.adafruit.com web site where I constructed a 'dashboard' for viewing the humidity-temperature data stream and have a switch for turning the light-bulb on and off.
I'm probably going to add some automation to the code so that the bulb will come on for 24 hours anytimg the humidity in the container rises above 15%