Having an enclosed 3D printer can make a huge difference when printing certain filaments that are prone to warping. It’s easy enough to build an enclosure to stick your own printer in, but it can get tricky when you want to actively control the conditions inside the chamber. That’s where [Jayant Bhatia]’s Chamber Master project comes in.
This system is built around the ESP32 microcontroller, which provides control to various elements as well as hosts a web dashboard letting you monitor the chamber status remotely. The ESP32 is connected to an SSD1306 OLED display and a rotary encoder, allowing for navigating menus and functions right at the printer, letting you select filament type presets and set custom ones of your own. A DHT11 humidity sensor and a pair of DS18B20 temperature sensors are used to sense the chamber’s environment and intake temperatures.
One of the eye-catching features of the Chamber Master is the iris-controlled 120 mm fan mounted to the side of the chamber, allowing for an adjustable-size opening for air to flow. When paired with PWM fan control, the amount of airflow can be precisely controlled.
The project looks cool, and I was interested in how he made it. Mostly as I was wondering how it keeps a constant temperature across the whole build volume. This isn’t trivial, or at least not at fractions of a degree. This project doesn’t seem to have any of that, and is mainly a vibe coded control system. A state machine determined by the state of the vent and the delta in temperature determines what the vent should be. E.g. “VENT_START_WAIT_CLOSED_AGAIN”.
The printer itself has control loops (likely PID) on both the nozzle and heated bed. Layering another control on top is not ideal, even more so if your control can effectively only control the cooling. When you do, it’s important to make the control loop a magnitude slower, as not to influence the other loops. But, with this whole project, I believe that the printer can be modded to include heated chamber control. And if you must, just program a PID with a temperature sensor and control over the vent/fan. This would be a library and very simple code. A PID also adjusts for external factors like your room temperature, which the current system can’t.
“When you do, it’s important to make the control loop a magnitude slower, as not to influence the other loops.”
This is wisdom. It’s essential guidance for any project where the goal is to provide a stable environment for another system.
That’s such a cool project and the voice of the narrator is Hollywood quality. Well done
Welcome to modern AI voiceover. Ick.
I wonder why the accent drifts through the narration. Creepy.
I’ve noticed accent drift or an abrupt change in tone/levels more often once YouTube said they were going to enhance their AI policies. It could be coincidental or it might be a technique to try and get around the detection mechanisms.