What you’re really saying is that there is no such thing as a completely sealed environment when discussing 3D equipment. If you could find a Mason jar that you could put your spool of filament into, then that would be a sealed and near perfect environment till the rubber gasket ages and disintegrates over the next 100 years. For the immediate future, it would be perfect.
The AMS has a seal, but is it perfect? I doubt it since it’s designed to ‘leak’ the filament out to the printer and the printer is in no way a sealed environment.
Plastic bags are permeable to atmospheric gasses unless specifically designed to be impermeable as in vacuum sealer bags. The thicker the plastic, and better the seal, the closer it is to a ‘perfect’ enough environment to keep moisture away from the filament. That’s why I intend to use food storage containers once the spool has been dehumidified by my gadget. Adding a dehydrating agent to the container is insurance for how long that container will keep moisture out. Adding in the inexpensive humidity meters allows one to monitor each container individually.
PLA take quite a while to get ‘wet’, other filaments can be worse, including PLA+ that often has PETG mixed into it.
Many people just store it out in the open and dry it for a few hours before use. If you dont want to do that put it in a sealed box with some silica gel. The Gel can get dried in an oven, or even in a filament dryer.
thanks for answering. I see the difficalty you guys face now. Maybe a big rice bucket will do the trick then. I personally do the seal environment to pervent the dust problem, mainly on my plates and filament.
Where I am, the Caribbean Sea and the tropical sun provide a constant humidity year round. Books swell up if left subject to ambient humidity and start to rot. Stainless steel rusts. If you leave your car in the sun for 2 weeks, when you open it up it will have mold all over the interior. That’s how bad humidity is on an island.
I weld. I can take a piece of steel and grind the surface crud off it to bright shiny metal and in an hour there’s an ever so slight coating of rust on it visible if I run a paper towel over it. It also rains here with a clear blue sky, seemingly out of nowhere and lasts for a minute or two, just enough to cause the metal I just cleaned to get rusty inside of a few minutes due to direct water contact and the usual high heat.
What many people do in more reasonable environments doesn’t work here.
Electricity is expensive at US $0.45/kWh now. One of my businesses, a bakery, regularly had $2,000 to $3,000 electric bills per month, many years ago, depending on season, when it was about US $0.30/kWh. A/C was the biggest part of that bill.
Why do you think everything is expensive for tourists when they visit the Caribbean? The only thing cheap around here is sunshine.
With the recall of the A1 I was able to return my unit to Microcenter and get a full refund. I bought a X1C with AMS unit and cured my filament exposure to high humidity here and the Dallas Texas area and am so much happier with this new printer.
Just keep it in a box with some sort of desiccant. Make sure the box is sealed. Many use Ikea boxes and add some sealing strip, but use whatever you can find.
Many also use cheap humidity sensors in the boxes to keep an eye on the levels. they dont have to be super accurate.
I lived in the DFW area for 30 years; Plano, Bedford, Trophy Club. I had a completely tree covered property in Trophy Club and had a large thermometer mounted in the shade outside. I recall readings over 110F routinely mid summer. They report the official temperature 100 meters above DFW airport to not scare away the tourists. Here, mid summer it’s just like DFW only with way more humidity.
I’m holding off the purchase of an X1C plus AMS till my gadget’s done; maybe another month of rain and then the switch gets thrown to dry as a bone for months. The dirt here is full of iron so the red mud turns into red pre-rock.
I already bought the food tubs I intend to use, plus the parts for allowing them to feed filament out from within the box including cheap humidity gauges that’ll tell me what the weather’s like inside. I’ve seen several designs for the gauge holders that double as desiccant storage so that’s one of the first things I’ll print.
I watched some videos concerning vibration and needing a proper surface for the X1C to sit on, so I’ll weld up a rolling cart with a 2-3" poured concrete top and a tray full of sand just below it for added weight and to allow the sand grains to absorb some of the vibration. The cart will have shelving for food tub/filament storage built in.
The unit is going into a warehouse environment outside my office when it’s in use so any fumes will waft away. There, the temperature will stay in the high 80’s to lower 90’s even during the worst heat periods.
I don’t really have a use for the AMS so I’ll just put that on a shelf in my office. My printer use is for engineering parts, all one color probably with carbon fiber, but word will spread on the island that the gadget exists via ‘coconut telegraph’ as it’s called here and I’ll get requests for things that might use the AMS. I’m sure my wife will figure out she needs some gadgetry printed also, once she understands what the thing can actually do. Right now she has it classified as another toy like my drones.
I live in the Garland area and have lived in the DFW area my entire life!!! There are a few things I will miss with the A1 I can tell already. I had customized the extruder to look like a Minion. Can’t change the extruder cover on the X1C. I will miss the nozzle swaps, A1 was a very fast procedure the X1C is quite involved. I had customized the tune the A1 played, the X1C I don’t think has this. ;-(
I made this drier with 5mm plywood and a piece of Polycarbonate multicore for the door. 3mm Glass is another option but I wanted to keep it light enough to carry easily. I replaced all fans with very quiet ones (<40db) .
Like your approach, it uses an esp32 and a 1200watt PTC heating element.
I have a few (7) DS18B20 TO-92 temperature sensors.
At the heating element, there is a 95c thermal cutout for safety.
I found that I needed two temperature controlling loops.
The first keeps the element from melting the PC printed mounting bracket
Another is at the top of the metal tube (rain downspout) which I use to manage the second heating control loop. The mushroom bit distributes the hot air output.
The display is a 2.4" 320x240 LCD from Waveshare. I have a control box out of PC just inside, behind the bezel with a 40mm exhaust fan that pulls cool, room air through vents in the bottom the bezel inside to cool the control box which holds the esp32, power relay and both 240-12v and 240-5v transformers. The LED strip wants the 12v and the esp32, display and relay needs the 5v
I have two humidity sensor. One at the ceiling and the other on a short cable placed inside the reel cores. There are also a number of adjustable slide openings in the cabinet.
The esp32 tracks all sensors and writes to a timestamped downloadable data file and publishes the data on my intranet. I have one esp32 core managing the heating element and the other does everything else. Its all written in standard Arduino.
Temperature is set with the digital encoder in a menu with PLA/TPU/PETG/PC-PA choices which are written the ‘prefs’ area in the esp32.
The led indicates ‘element on’ plus, I have a small piece of RGB led strip wired to make the whole bezel glow red if the element overshoots. Was thinking of making it go green on humidity=OK.
The little switch on the inside is an override of the element. I have an LED string just inside the sides and top for lighting controlled by the microswitch for off/on.
I designed it to handle 90c inside. The cabinet has an inside unpainted ply layer then a layer of insulating foam/foil then the painted outside layer. I didn’t paint the inside as I worried about paint peeling but the outside is exterior house paint.
Just as the email came in for your reply, I was designing the interior housing for my gadget in CAD.
I’m experimenting so nothing is certain but I’m looking at an octagonal cylinder on its side to minimize interior volume, made out of thin galvanized steel about 20 gauge. I weld and have equipment to bend thin steel into shape accurately but only plan on riveting the interior ends together to form the cylinder; no welding on galvanized.
The reason for metal is I need the metal’s heat transport ability because I don’t want any fans inside. I went looking for high temperature capable fans but didn’t find any small enough for my liking. I also don’t trust fans to stay operable for long at elevated temperature no matter what the spec sheet says.
The shape also helps circulate air because the heaters are all on one side so as hot air rises there, call it the front of the unit, it has to fall on the back of the unit. The chamber being so small means there won’t be any place for significant hot spots, especially since the entire thing is well insulted so the heat input has almost no where to go.
Outside that octagonal thin steel cylinder will be 1" of high temp oven insulation, already purchased, and then the actual outside of the unit is another octagon out of high temp 3D printed plastic. The plastic, insulation, galvanized steel form a heavily insulated bucket lying on its side with a similar permanently attached insulated side on one end to offer only the other end
as an opening for one or two spools. That opening will be capped with another sandwich of steel, insulation and plastic to cover the hole.
Spools go into the side of the unit and sit on galvanized steel because I didn’t want to paint the interior or else I would have welded up 16 gauge which would be very sturdy. No paint on mild steel would rust in one use so that wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t use plastic because it doesn’t conduct heat well enough.
The place where your approach and mine differ exceedingly is on wattage. I believe I can get away with under 50 watts, 22 actually, of heating power and my code is designed to increase temperature very slowly, since I’m in no hurry. The air pump will independently function as needed to evacuate moist air and replace it with dehydrated air from another gadget that the 3D printer will eventually provide.
Interesting… I’m new to this world of thermal dynamics and drying. A bunch of trial and error here.
I used the 1200w PTC heater as it was just $US 21 from AliExpress and I manage it with my heating logic; it is pretty well throttled down. I agree with your worry about the fan. The heater came with a bracket that mounts the fan on the ‘cold’ side, pushing air through the heater element. I remade that piece in polycarbonate (on my X1) with brackets to attach to metal up tube. Time will tell how long that all lasts.
Lucky you with your metalwork skills. I thought about getting sheet metal here but the plywood was cheap and much easier for me to manage. Won’t be the first time that I chose wrong.
I use Inkbird PID controllers for my bread baking warming and baking oven controls but I wanted to use the esp32. I tried but didn’t have the patience to work out the Arduino PID libraries. So I have written some simple temperature management logic which ramps quickly until close to the set temp then shifts to a slower, fine-tuning ramp to avoid overshooting. I plan to come back to that once I do more testing and some successful drying runs.
I had a look back at your earlier post on this subject and thoughts on AMS etc.
FWIW, I came from a Prusa Mini before I shifted to the X1.
Back then, I found an ‘airtight’ filament box solution and had those hanging around.
I mostly print in PETG for the balance of strength and ease of use. I initially used PA for stronger, hotter application but shifted to PC. All of that drove me to the X1 and I’ve not looked back.
I added a second AMS unit as I regularly shift between PETG and PC (automatically). I can manually shift in TPU, PA and PA-CF kept in those ‘airtight’ boxes but that happens less frequently. I bought a 7kg tub of desiccant beads and added the holders that fit inside the AMS which keep mine to 12-15%. It is very convenient.
The left one is up to 20% today as its been maybe six weeks since I refreshed it and I’ve loaded a couple PETG reels since. Humidity sneaks in… Time for a refresh.
I decided to use those ‘airtight’ containers for the new Mini with a big one for the common filament (PETG and a couple PLA reels for fun). Lucky me here as ambient is around 50-60% so I’ve not yet had a chance to dry everything and load desiccant.
Having both printers is working for me as I kept the .04 nozzle in the Mini which makes it a great for smaller fittings and prototype bits while the X1 with a .06 nozzle is printing the bigger, engineering grade parts in whatever.
There’s no aluminum on the island. If there were, I’d use aluminum and go round since aluminum doesn’t like to bend once it get to any appreciable thickness. A graceful arc into a 12" diameter cylinder is something reasonably thin aluminum could handle and it would be a really good heat conductor.
I’m sorry I waited into my 50’s to discover welding and steel. Up to that point, I made wooden projects and even refinished a kitchen, built a 100Gal aquarium wall unit, builtin cabinets, etc. I’ve got routers, table saws, … all the stuff to do professional grade wood work, but now I’m almost exclusively into metal. Once you see what you can do with ordinary steel, you’ll never go back to wood for anything structural. If you’re a young guy, look into welding. Start with MIG and graduate to TIG; forget stick.
I thought about a PID loop but I don’t think I need one. My approach is to slowly increase temperature over time so the outside of the spool doesn’t get hot while the interior is still relatively cold. My idea of using a pumped in source of dehumidified air should get a spool or two dried out faster than the commercial units without temperature stressing the filament. I also have scuba tanks of incredibly low humidity air plus welding tanks of almost 0% humidity CO2 and Argon I could pump into the chamber, but I think the aquarium pump will be sufficient just using desiccant conditioned air.
The parts I’m using should go to 110C but I’ll software limit to much less. Months ago, I cobbled together a gadget to make black garlic and it was a failure because I couldn’t go hot enough (70C) using an insulated beverage cooler. That led me to think of doing a more serious job because I want the black garlic and so I’m designing for two units, one for the garlic and the other for the spools. It’s the same code and parts for both but I don’t want to be printing garlic smelling plastic so need two units.
Here’s a unit I soldered up but I used the wrong board.
The power supply is on the upper left followed by 2 solid state relays good to 2A AC only. The LCD is a 1602A. All the parts are what I had on hand.
The solder job came out very poor, and I’m an EE that’s been soldering since I was 13. I have this board coming in: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082KY5Y5Z
It should make the soldering much nicer since it offers connectors on one side just like the prototyping boards.
What is wrong with printing your own spool containers with built in desiccant holder, like this one: makerworld model 50381? (Wouldn’t let me post a link)
What I’m after is a heavily insulated chamber that will hold two 1kg spools. That chamber has to be able to take up to 80C repeatedly and also has to allow for the heaters, air injection / ejection ports, sensors and wiring. Plastic is a poor heat conductor, so I need metal to disperse the interior heat to avoid hot spots and because I don’t trust fans to function for long in such a hot environment.
The interior has a roughly 9" diameter and the outside shell around 11" with 1" of insulation in between, closed at one end and open at the other. Because I want to inject dry air into the chamber, it has to be relatively air tight to avoid leakage of ambient air into the chamber which means the smallest opening possible.
In short, everything has to be controlled and I need a chamber designed for that purpose.
Cardboard absorbs moisture from the air as well as any surface with which it comes into contact.
The box it comes in , and the silica in the middle too
