Fan Controls lacking

[BimmyBot 0]

Hi. I have a k1 that I'm really struggling to get to play nice with cura. Creality print was fine for the demo prints but useless for fine tuning structural and mechanical parts. Also had to just remove the side fan and tape up the exhaust fan...

 

I'm currently trying to figure out how to control more fans than just the part cooling fan. There are 2 more fans on this printer, (both of which I'll be re-purposing for filtration and chamber heating,) but step one is getting cura to control them at all. why don't I have duplicate fan controls for as many fans as I want? enter number of fans in machine settings, let me turn on cooling settings for each one, maybe duplcate the "cooling" section x times, with "fan 0" "fan 1"..."fan 42" etc.  same commands, just different fan index. I should be able to send pwm signals to a dozen different pinouts if I wanted to.

 

Does the heated build volume option also control a fan? is that a klipper-specific question involving macros? am I in the right place? what is the meaning of lif?

 

Eventually I need to trigger a relay to also send power from an external psu to a ptc heater, but I can probably just use the fan power to do that (if pwm doesn't mess with the relay...)

 

If I can get cura to send any commands similar to part cooling and bridge settings fan speed controls, but with different fan index numbers, I can probably write macros to interpret them into what I need. 

 

Cura 5.6.0

Creality K1, rooted with moonraker, mainsail, etc

attached: work-in-progress project file (ignore printer type, nozzle size, etc)

20mm cube - klipper test.3mf

[Slashee_the_Cow 410]

7 hours ago, BimmyBot said:

Does the heated build volume option also control a fan?

That's for printers which fully close (i.e. they have a complete enclosure and you open a door to get to your prints), they can make sure the air temperature inside is even more stable to prevent warping. It's generally only used to control a heater.

 

I really have no idea about Klipper though. Straight Marlin makes it easy to control particular fans in gcode (you just specify a P parameter on the M106 command to control fan speed). Altering them individually is entirely possible in a post-processing script. I've never been lucky/experimental enough to play with a printer expensive/modified enough to have multiple fans, so I don't know off the top of my head if there's an existing script or a way to do it in Cura.

[GregValiant 1,342]

Cura can control any number of fans...as long as they are layer cooling fans because they must be tied to an extruder.  As Slashee indicated the commands that come from Cura will be M106 Pxx commands.  The "P" parameter is only inserted if the printer has multiple hot ends/extruders and they have different fans.  All fan commands go in at tool changes.

 

For simple on/off functions you could put the commands into the StartUp and Ending GCode.  For real actual control then the commands need to be interspersed throughout the gcode file.

 

You have a third party printer that has been modified by a fourth party using fifth party parts and firmware.  That's fine, but I think you need to take the next step to "custom everything".

 

If the firmware is capable of accepting certain commands, and if you have the output capability for the defined fan circuits that will respond to particular commands, then you could post-process a Cura gcode and insert the commands wherever you want.  You may not need a Klipper macro, but you may need a custom mainboard (or a daughterboard of some sort) to give you sufficient I/O for what you want to do.  There is no point in putting all the time and effort into this if your current mainboard only has 1 cooling fan output.