Difference between revisions of "Z-stage fan mount (Q40188)"

Blowing on the interface layer of the raft seems to make it release easier (or at all in my case). It also seems to help stop tall skinny prints from deforming. Huffing and puffing over the build chamber makes me light headed and probably isn't good for you though. Instead I've been using one of these little fans salvaged from an old PC. It worked pretty well, but jamming the wires into random power sources (9v bat, extra PSU connectors, random ATX terminals) to turn it on/off gets old, and holding it over the build area isn't much better than blowing on it manually! So instead I soldered a salvaged floppy-drive power connector and switch to the fan wire, and designed these brackets to wedge in the front opening in the z-stage. Now I can just flip the fan on whenever I thick more air flow is needed! I'm posting a modified version that should work better than the ones I mounted, YMMV. I'm think I'm going to design another version that only hangs off of one side of the stage opening. I also want to try printing a funnel to direct the air flow more precisely. I used (a slightly modified version of) the wonderful py2scad module to write my design in Python. I mainly wanted syntax coloring, but this also gives you a real programming language with objects, proper functions, recursion, all the math you could want, and access to all the other great Python modules! The OpenSCAD output file is still pretty readable, but is not parametrized. I'm going to try adding comments to the generated output to at least make it easier to figure out what is what.