Air Manager And/Or SMB Pinout?

[rachael7 73]

So I've been fighting with chamber temperature control on my S5 w/Air Manager, and after consulting with fbrc8, I've been informed that the S5 does not actually do active (closed loop) chamber temperature control. All it does is take the chamber temperature set in Cura, look that up in a static table, and pick the corresponding fan speed. It never varies that speed or monitors the chamber temp to confirm that the selected fan speed is correct. So as you would expect, this sometimes results in chamber temps too low and sometimes too high, depending on your ambient conditions, nozzle temps, bed temp, and other factors.  The prints I am working on require reasonably accurate chamber temps, so this just isn't working for my application. 

 

I'm more than a little disappointed that closed loop control is not enabled for the chamber temps, but I need it to work, so I'm working on how to do my own chamber temperature control. My first thought is to use the air manager as it exists, but instead of running it to the UMB port on the printer, where I am limited to the UM firmware's lack of control, running the Air Manager to my own control device.  It's easy enough to build a PID temp controller these days, so that seems like the short path to a solution.  To implement that though, I need to know the pinout of the Air Manager connector, or possibly the pinout of the SMB connector, which I guess would be the same thing.  Does anyone have that information?  Or any information about the I2C protocol to communicate with the Air Manager?

[JASON128 6]

Wow- good to know- was about to buy one- but that completely rules it out.!!!  ill make my own then at a more reasonable cost.

 

what an incredibly stupid implementation by the design team - speed control on the fan for cooling is obvious, and like you say- cheap to do.  I can only guess its a way around patients in heated chambers?  

[JASON128 6]

i would suggest just a simple temperature controller- and use a signal off the case fans in the bottom- as they only run when the machine is active.

[rachael7 73]

5 minutes ago, JASON128 said:

i would suggest just a simple temperature controller- and use a signal off the case fans in the bottom- as they only run when the machine is active.

Since I already have the Air Manager, if UM would just give me the pinout, I could pick up their signals and use them in my own controller. Would yield a nice tight solution, perfect fit on the machine, still using the nice filter setup, pick up enable/disable signaling, etc.  But I've been waiting a month already and it appears that information is not forthcoming, so I expect what I'll eventually do is just rip out their electronics, install a thermocouple, and bring that and the fan leads out to my own controller, which might also be controlling auxiliary chamber heaters as well.

[rachael7 73]

12 minutes ago, JASON128 said:

what an incredibly stupid implementation by the design team - speed control on the fan for cooling is obvious, and like you say- cheap to do.  I can only guess its a way around patients in heated chambers?  

I couldn't agree more. When it was first released, I saw some posts indicating that might be the case, so I thought maybe they just rushed it to market.  But several years have gone by and I simply can't believe they haven't finished the implementation in that time. Heated chamber patent is a good guess, actually. There's no other logical reason not to implement something so trivially simple, when all the pieces and code are already there.