Just started round two of the Metro Express Case project and you may find these charts interesting.
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Ok. You piqued my curiosity. Forgive my ignorance but what is the Metro Express Case project?
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I have several sensors which if you are curious about a sensor feel free to ask.
You can daisy chain the sensors together, various microcontrollers will send the data back to the company that makes the sensors and you can build various ways of looking at the data. They are inherently better than these relative humidity things you can get from Amazon.
I’m just using OpenSCAD to build a case for the microcontroller that pushed the data back to the company, which is Adafruit.com in NY.
Not sure if you know what a Raspberry Pi is but I’ve been messing with them for years. It’s a computer rather than a microcontroller.
The orange box that warped is for a microcontroller. Cheap. What high school STEM programs use to build robots.
Using
Rapberry Pi, I put this together. Bigger monitor I need to tweak the CSS and HTML
I’m sort of test driving sensors now but already seeing some interesting data. As soon as I hit send in Bambu Studio you see the VOC’s and particulate spike so that’s not a particularly healthy environment in the P1S enclosure.
The PM1, 2.5, and10, PM is Particulate Matter/Material. Take your pick.
I’m seeing it live as opposed to those static pictures I posted.
It is my intent to make it available to whoever wants to see it once I settle on sensors. But I want to put some sensors in the “roof” of the P1S and some in the AMS ultimately.
Hopefully help the community at-large get a better sense of whats going on in the boxes.
OK, I misunderstood that you were referring to Adafruit’s Metro ESP32 product.
I’ve been deeply involved with the Raspberry Pi ecosystem since starting with the RPi 2 back in 2016, as well as Arduino and now the ESP32 embedded Wi-Fi products. Across my lab and household, I have over two dozen devices, including purpose-built projects like Pi-Hole, a mousetrap surveillance system running MotionEye, a heating oil level sensor, and an RPi4 running my Home Assistant server, which monitors, among other things, my Bambu P1P. My last Raspberry Pi was the RPi 4, but I’ve since moved to the Arduino and ESP32 ecosystem due to the rising costs of the Raspberry Pi 5. It’s now priced higher than even a low-end Intel NUC. During Covid, I found it increasingly difficult to access Pi hardware, with the Pi Zero often priced well beyond the promised $5 mark, which pushed me toward other solutions.
While I have a lot of respect for Adafruit and have followed Limor Fried (AKA Lady Ada) for several years, I’ve moved away from their ecosystem as well. Simply put, there are more robust and cost-effective options within the ESP32 family of products. Don’t get me wrong—Adafruit is invaluable to the community. Their tutorials and contributions to Arduino and Raspberry Pi drivers are unmatched, but as someone who votes with their wallet, I often use their libraries with other, less expensive hardware.
As for 3D printing, my frustrations with available enclosure solutions initially got me interested in the space. It sounds like you’re on a similar path.
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If I may offer a suggestion:
If you’re using OpenSCAD, learning true parametric CAD will be a far more powerful and flexible design method. I used OpenSCAD for a while, but I abandoned it because it felt like a science project that never fully evolved. Despite my background as a former software developer and POV-Ray fan, OpenSCADs scripted approach would seem like it was right up my ally. However, I found it to be slow, unstable, and prone to crashes on multiple systems I used it on. It feels more like a science project stuck in the past, designed for Windows XP and Linux without much progression.
If you haven’t already looked at Teaching Tech’s YouTube Channel, he has an 8 part series on OnShape Training for 3D printing that is as close as it comes to being a tailor-made class for folks who are 3D printing enthusiasts. He is a former high school Stem teacher that you wish you had back in high school and all of his videos are under 10-15 minutes for each chapter and hears a tip, play them at 2X speed and you’ll cut your learning time in half. His Australian accent and clear speech lends itself to fast listening.
Here’s the play list.
You don’t have to view all of them to get started but, I would view these two first and then skip to the chapters you’re more interested in. I promise you that as an OpenSCAD user, you will easily pick this up and wonder why you didn’t make the switch sooner. Also, anything you pick up here is applicable to any other parametric CAD package such as Fusion360, FreeCAD or SolidWorks.
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The case project is straight up metro express ESP32-S2
I’m heading in that direction for same basic reason you are. Cost.
I must have had some sort of clairvoyant event because for some reason I bought 3 Pi 4’s and 2 Pi 5’s like a month before Covid struck so that will keep me covered probably forever to be honest about it. I just got two PyPortal Titano’s from Adafruit about 3 hours ago. I may name something my case project but they are always about electronics, not the case.
I’ve watched many of Teaching Tech’s video’s. He puts out decent content compared to a bunch of the folks churning out video’s that keep them in free stuff.
Sounds like we are in the same lane in general
FWIW I sort of know where you are coming from as far as OpenSCAD because it’s a bad sign when it is 2023 and you are using OpenSCAD 2014 but it has been getting upgraded lately and pretty sure they are going to roll out a 64 bit version in the near future.
Some of that is attributable to it being open-source.
There are pro’s and con’s to using open source. The maintainers and implementers get bored. If companies start chasing a Bambu Lab business model, they may lose the folks who like to monkey with their machines but they’ll gain more customers in the end. Klipper, Marlin and that whole tweaking/modding ecosystem I talk smack about will dry up.
From warped box yesterday to minor adjustments today. I’ll take it.
Also, other sources of electronics, I’m all ears.
Can you share captured data values from a print similar to that BUT at a distance of about 2-3 meters from the printer?
TIA
I would have to put sensors in the desired location. What is it you are curious about.
Those sensors are inside a P1S enclosure which has no real circulation. People build weather stations and HA devices to tell air quality in their homes pretty routinely. I don’t mind sharing the info but those sensors are in the worst possible location for capturing home interior data. But over time, with the printer idle and the enclosure door open it will become ambient at some point.
Home Assistant
Air Quality Monitoring Projects to Help You Breathe Easy
They are ahead of me. My father was a hard core math person so adding and subtracting boxes and cylinders is math with unusual units of measure.
knew you two would hit it off.
I’m curious about the raise in VOCs levels in the room when printing ABS.
I have not printed anything in ABS yet but if you bear with me for a bit I am going to add more sensors in more locations. I bought several more of that type sensor .I just posted that snapshot to show what is possible.
My job, before retirement, was in the control room of a powerplant that had something like 30k - 40k sources of live data that I monitored 12 hours a day. Consequently I am a fan of data over anecdote and there is too much anecdote and not enough data in 3d printing.
I am sure most people are aware that burning plastic is toxic. In 3d printing we sort of sneak up close to that point quite often. Who among us has not had to deal with a charred nozzle?
I will be installing more sensors of the appropriate types but it will take several weeks.
I just bought a spool to see how it performs.
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I look forward to watching your progress. This project mirrors a concept I simply have not had the energy or time to pursue. My thought was an MQTT-based dashboard which would act as an environmental monitor of the printer enclosure. It sounds to me that you’ve already made significant progress into the realm and I’ll be sticking close to this topic in hopes that you succeed. 
While I am certainly aware of MQTT and other data transmission tools, I have never taken the time to learn them.
MQTT among them.
My philosophy about some of this type of data is “I want it in my face” so in that vein, since you mentioned it, is Pi-Hole. I’ve had numerous renditions of Pi-Hole and these pictures are my latest attempt at In my face.
You might want to look at Pi.Alert
When I was working in that powerplant amid all those thousands of data points one lesson I learned early on was the data is worthless if you do not act on it.
If my boilers would shut down when the steam temperature hit 1000º F, I best not sit there with my thumb you know where.
In the context of the more toxic filaments, acting on the (future) data may have me putting a small version of a dryer vent with a Noctua or similar fan and flex hose setup on top of printer to blow out the window I purposefully put printer next to.
Pi-Hole
