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, and the fumes are unpleasant an probably not as healthy.

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.

After finalizing the enclosure, additional lights where added to actually see what the printer was doing inside the enclosure. Buying LED lights would be to easy, so I redesigned a smaller version of the ceiling light LED driver instead. This means that the LED lights inside the enclosure, are dim and color synchronized with the LED lights on the ceiling.

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 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.

In order to automate the setup, an 3D printed enclosure with (in KiCad) custom designed power-supply, PWM fan controller, and LED driver PCB where added to the XnorDuino system. As can be seen in the image underneath:

The Raspberry Pi that controls the setup, is programmed to automatically read temperature and print status from the Prusa printers API, and control the PWM fan accordingly based on Nozzle temperature.

The Raspberry Pi is also programmed to keep the LED lights inside the enclosure synchronized to dim and color values with the LED ceiling lights.