Upgrade Your Fans With Klipper Firmware

fans are an incredibly important yet often overlooked part of any 3D printer from preventing heat creep giving you clean overhangs and keeping your controller from overheating most printers have a handful of them the Mercury 1.1 I built is using the big tree Tech Manta m8p board and CB1 Pi alternative my buddy Luke let me know that this combo ran a bit warm on his build and recommended that I add a fan to help out with cooling due to this I spent more time than I had initially planned reading through the Clipper docs and experimenting to set that fan up so that it's controlled by the temperature of the CB1 when my TD tank x max 3 review unit showed up I quickly discovered that the controller fan is super loud and it's always on with more and more printers shipping with Clipper I felt it was important to take some time and take a look at the different fan types that are available in today's video we will look through our fan type options and what they mean cover how to monitor board temperatures and go through the process of setting up the x-max 3 controller fan to kick on and off based on the controller temps so with all that being said and without further Ado let's get right into today's video [Music] jumping right in in Clipper firmware there are five types that you can declare any fan as these are fan heater fan controller fan temperature fan and fan generic each fan you were using that you want to be controlled in Clipper will need the fan type you are assigning to it and a unique name I recommend naming the fan something that's easy to remember in the case of my x-max 3 most of the fans are set as output pins with generic names like fan zero to Fan 2 which made it difficult to know which fan I was addressing I ended updating the names of all the fans so I can quickly identify which fan I was addressing if you're updating fans that are tied to any macros that you're using make sure you update the fan names there as well or you will get an error each of the fan types have unique behaviors and attributes associated with them the first just called fan is used for part cooling this can be used for single or multiple fans mounted on your tool head or even a separate auxiliary fan these are the fans that you want to trigger when you enable part Cooling in your 3D printer slicer next is heater fan which like the name implies is triggered when a specific heater is active the most common use for this fan type is your hot ends heatsink fan when the hot end is warming up or being used this fan helps keep the heatsink cool and prevents clogs from heat creeping into the cold zone of your hot end you can set these fans to trigger for any heater and that also includes your bed heater which can be useful if you have an enclosed 3D printer and when the bed is warming you have some specific bed fans that help to cycle that air around your printer's chamber you also have the ability to set a specific temperature for each heater that the fan will kick on at then there is controller fan which works very similar to the heater fan although less common this fan type can also be used for a heater but it's more commonly used for a stepper driver by default this fan type will kick on when any stepper driver is active temperature fan is the fourth option and the one we are going to be using shortly this fan type allows the fan to be triggered by a temperature an example of this is is a chamber thermistor the temperature sensor built into a Raspberry Pi or the temperature sensor found in many microcontrollers like the common stm32 simply put with this type of fan you were saying when this sensor hits a specific temperature turn on this fan and when this sensor drops below a certain temperature turn that fan off lastly we have fan generic which doesn't have any built-in behaviors this is a manually controlled fan that can be activated through your dashboard when you want to or you can implement it into a macro each of these fan types have a host of parameters that can be set specifically within them if you're looking at the Clipper docs and feeling a bit overwhelmed stop most of these fan types have a bunch of parameters that are already pre-configured and a lot of those defaults are going to be perfectly fine also the parameters are spelled out pretty well in the documentation and I found that just doing some Googling to find some example configs for reference really helps to sort of understand how you can apply the different settings one of the many things I love about the Mainsail or fluid dashboard it's how easy it is to monitor the various temperature sensors on your 3D printer by default any head or chamber thermistor will show up but you will need to add a few lines to your printer config to see your MCU and Raspberry Pi or Pi alternative for this we will use the temperature sensor type like with any other heading you can name it whatever you'd like but I usually just go with something generic like MCU Pi or CB1 depending on what I'm using if you're running multiple boards or say a controller board and a tool headboard you might want to name them something a bit more specific under the temperature sensor heading the only line we need is sensor type for our MCU the sensor type is temperature underscore MCU and for our PI or Pi alternative it will be temperature underscore host now when we restart our Clipper firmware we will be able to see the temperatures for both of these listed at the top and in our temperature graph now that we know the fan types available in Clipper and we can see a temperature readout from our board it's time to combine those two things together on the chittytech xmax 3 the controller fan is small it's loud and it runs at hundred percent the entire time the printer is on I started out by looking in the printer.cfg file and I didn't see that the fan was defined anywhere after checking that port and all the open ports on the included controller I discovered there was not a single addressable connection left after verifying that the LEDs were 24 volts and seeing their pin in the config file I decided to swap the LEDs and the fan the LEDs that are built into this are not very bright and because this printer is going to be primarily used in my office or Studio I really don't mind just having the light on whenever the printer is on the fan on the other hand was definitely not something I wanted to hear the entire time the printer was just sitting here idle once I physically swapped them it was time to get the fan configured correctly in my printer.cfg the first thing I had to do was set the type for the fan since we want it to be temperature controlled we need to Define it as temperature underscore fan the name could be anything you would like but I went with controller fan the pin will vary depending on the board you're using and since we swapped the fan and the LED pc7 is going to still be correct for control we will go with Watermark this will have the fan turn on above a certain temperature and turn off below another temperature since we're using Watermark we need to set our Max Delta this is our range above and below the desired temperature that the fan will be on or off the max Delta value to choose is totally up to you depending on your target temperature and what it is that you're controlling but you definitely don't want to set it too high because otherwise your fan will not kick on until things are way too hot for my fan and my board I started with a Delta of 5 and ended up dropping it to three next we have sensor type which is where we will Define what thermal reading we want this fan to be controlled by it in this case I went with temperature underscore host because I want the rock chip to be the determining factor for this fan you can use any sensor here though depending on the fan and what your goal is it can be the host it can be the MCU or any other sensor that you have now we need to Define A Min and a Max temperature this has nothing to do with our fan and is more of a sanity check we are saying that if this temperature reads Above This value or below this value something is definitely wrong and it will halt Clipper I went with zero Celsius as my Min and 100 Celsius as my Max to create a safe Zone last but definitely not least is our Target Temp this is the temperature we would like our sensor to be at and for our fan to maintain this will heavily vary depending on what you're wanting to do and which sort of controller that you have the rock chip runs hot and even when completely idle I saw it get around 68 to 69 Celsius due to this I set the target temperature at 70 Celsius with my Max Delta of 3 that means that the fan kicks on at 73 Celsius and runs until the chip has cooled down to 67 Celsius with my new settings and a fair bit of testing other than in one instance where my room got a bit warm the rock chip idles at about 65 Celsius the fan only kicks on when the printer is in use which combined with the other sounds that the printer is making at that point I really don't mind this may seem like a small detail but it is a pretty nice quality of of Life Improvement especially if you're working again in the same room or around your printers and in my opinion the way things should have been done from the factory and that has been fan types and Clipper how to monitor your controller temps and how to use the temperature fan type to make your fans smarter I hope that you enjoyed this video that you have a much better understanding of the different fan types available how to use them and sort of examples of when you may want to use one over the other let me know in the comments down below if you have any questions and if you do end up setting up one of your fans using temperature fan or any of the other methods after watching this video let me know how it goes in the comments Down Below on that note don't forget to like And subscribe for more great videos we make a video every single week so there's always fresh content coming your way and if you do want to support the channel furthermore I'll have links Down Below in the description over to our patreon where there are some really awesome rewards huge thank you to all of our existing patreon supporters I appreciate each and every one of you for allowing me to come back every single week and spend more time doing what I love which is making content for you all to enjoy on that note this has been Diana from modbot and I look forward to seeing you guys guys in my next video peace guys

Channel: ModBot

Views: 27,032

Keywords: klipper, klipper firmware, klipper fans, 3d printer, 3d printer mods, chamber fan, case fan, exhaust fan, auxiliary fan, mercury 1.1, cb1 heat, btt fan, manta m8p, qidi tech, x-max3

Id: IhrfpiFtsbw

Length: 9min 21sec (561 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2023