3D printer enclosure

After purchasing a Prusa MK4, I wanted to put it in it's own enclosure with air-ventilation on it. This as many prints take a while, the fumes are unpleasant to sit in, and it's probably not that healthy as well…

Building the 3D printer from scratch, was a painful but exciting endeavour.

I wanted the enclosure to be around the same height as my cabinets above my workbench and preferably not to expensive. I therefore opted to use the famous IKEA LACK tables, in order to build an enclosure. They're less than 10 euro each. The top tables legs where shortened a bit, to reach perfectly below the cabinets on the wall… Mounting clips and hinges where 3D printed to hold everything in place.

The hinges where rather large, but I got them to fit diagonally.

After finalizing the enclosure, I added additional LED lights to see what the printer was doing during late evening prints. Buying commercial LED's would be to straight forward, so I redesigned a smaller 2xLED driver PCB instead.

Having a custom LED driver means that I could make the firmware compatible with my XnorDuino system, thus synchronizing dim and light temperature with the rest of the rooms ceiling lights.

A fan mount was designed and 3D printed, using FreeCad. Which could then connect to the airvent outlet. A 3300 RPM desktop PWM fan was added inbetween, in order to provide enough pressure given the long outlet pipe.

The PWM fan is controlled by a custom designed PWM controller, which hooks into the XnorDuino system. So the RPM is calculated based on the 3D printers nozzle temperature, which can be requested through the 3D printers API.

The exhaust of the ventilation is inside the attic, where a 3D printed one-way valve prevents cold air to go down the pipe during winter.

The lid is printed with just 2 layers in height, roughly 0.4mm thickness. Air from the fan pushes the lid upwards, gravity closes it back down when the fan stops rotating.

In order to clean up the ugly ventilation pipe, I 3D printed some additional covers to hide it behind.

As last I connected the LED-Driver, Fan controller and PSU module pcb's to the XnorDuino bus and put everything in a 3D printed enclosure. All pcb's where designed using KiCad and can be seen in the image underneath (box with green LED).

The box with the blue LED has an Raspberry-pi and XnorDuino Master inside it, which controls the XnorDuino bus. This Raspberry-Pi wil for example:

• Request the Prusa's 3D printers API for nozzle temperature, in order to adjust the PWM fan's RPM.
• Request the Prusa's 3D printers API for printer status (printing, pauzed, ended), in order to adjust the LED lights intensity.
• Receive API calls from the in-wall touchscreen, to adjust my ceiling lights configuration.