sam-skovgaard

Thanks snowygrouch, I have a similar philosophy on component happiness. So would wiring the fans in parallel with the big cooling fan that cools the electronics be the best way to wire it?

I have noticed that the stepper motors run kind of hot, and I had a really big print skip a step on the x stepper about 5 hours in, angering me profusely. I want to add some additional cooling to my stepper motors to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future, and I imagine that it would probably be good for the longevity of my steppers. I was thinking that I could just wire three little fans like these: http://www.directron.com/ec3007m12ca.html?gsear=1 in parallel with the fan that cools the electronics, that way they will always be on if the machine is powered up. For me, the arduino is a magical black box that I have almost no understanding of; is there any problem with this approach? Will there be enough excess current to power these fans, or will I end up destroying my magical black box? Is there a better (but also relatively simple) way to go about this?