PUT THE 3D PRINTER TO SLEEP SO YOU CAN REST EASY

At this point you’ve probably already heard the news: cheap Chinese 3D printers sometimes catch fire. Now we can’t say we’re shocked to find out that absolute bottom of the barrel gear wasn’t designed to the highest standards (gotta cut those corners someplace), but that doesn’t change the fact that there are thousands of hackers and makers out there who are in possession of one of these suspect machines. Just tossing them to the curb is hardly the hacker way, so we’ve got to find ways to make the best of the hand dealt to us.

After sleeping with one eye (and maybe one nostril) open during some overnight prints, Hackaday.io user [TheGrim] wanted a way to make sure his Alunar Anet A6 didn’t stay powered on any longer than necessary. So he came up with a way of using the printer’s own endstop switch to detect if the print has completed, and cut the power.

The idea is simple, but of course the real trick is in the implementation. By adding a “Home” command to his ending G-Code in Cura, [TheGrim] reasoned he could use the Y endstop switch to determine if the print had completed. It was just a matter of reading the state of the switch and acting on it.

In the most basic implementation, the switch could be used to control a relay on the AC side of the power supply. But [TheGrim] doesn’t trust relays, and he wanted to pack in a couple “smart” features so he ended up using a PIC microcontroller and two 12 amp TRIACs. There’s also a couple of LEDs and toggle switches to serve as the user interface, allowing you to enable and disable the automatic shutdown and get status information about the system.

Will cutting the juice to the PSU prevent another terrible fire? It’s debatable. But it certainly can’t hurt, and if it makes [TheGrim] feel more confident about running his machine, then so be it. We’d still advise anyone with a 3D printer at home to brush up on their fire safety knowledge.

Posted in 3d Printer hacks, MicrocontrollersTagged 3D printer fire, automatic, endstop, pic, TRIAC