Fan is always on?

Is there a reason the fan on the extruder module is always on full blast even when the printer is sitting idle with no heating of the nozzle at all? This thing sounds like a jet engine! You should look to noctua in the future!

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I agree, the fan should only activate when a project starts and several minutes after a project completes, so as to facilitate cooling down.

Doug

You are assuming that the fans are on a speed controller. You have to remember that while SnapMaker is making a high precision machine, they are also making an inexpensive machine. Trade offs have to be made somewhere. It is quite possible that in order to keep costs down they had to eliminate unnecessary parts. That could include a PWM controller for the fans. They may have just routed all the fans to 24V so when you flip the power switch all the fans instantly go full speed.

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I donā€™t care about controlling the speed. Just turn them off after the hot end has cooled or put in some quieter fans.

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Right, but if you can turn them on and off from the micro controller you can also control their speed. All a fan speed controller does is turn the fans on and off rapidly and vary the amount of time the fan is on vs off. This is easy for a micro controller to do as long as one of its output pins is routed to a transistor. The fact that they do not do this suggests that it is quite possible they CANā€™T do it because their control board lacks the transistor. As for quieter fans, if they skip out on a transistor why would they would go with higher end fans?

Look. I did not start this topic to argue about how micro controllers control fans.
My intent was to give feedback to the developers for a possible future fix. This is a great looking bit of industrial design worthy to sit on my desktop but the fan noise is deafening. It would be nice to have the noise reduced in a future iteration. Whether that is through a firmware update or a future iteration of the controller board hardware design, i do not care.

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@TwoWeims

I wholeheartedly agree. I consider our ideas and suggestions as going into the big melting pot of ideas for future versions.

I am having a great time with my Snapmaker and the noise does not bother me. I just printed my first Lithophanesā€¦wow, this is a whole new hobby and art form.

For a first time on market device, I think the Snapmaker is bloody brilliant and with our backing, helped to get it out there.

Keep having fun

Doug

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I notice the extruder fan is on and blowing directly on the print bed when printing with the ABS settings. I donā€™t see any options to turn it off and that is pretty much exactly what you want to do if you want abs to curl up off the bed while you are printing.

Right. Iā€™m also not trying to argue. All I was trying to get at is that a firmware upgrade may never be able to change the fan speeds as it may very well lack the parts to do so.

yeah thereā€™s just not enough pins.
what follows is theorycrafting from a quick look inside:
youā€™ve got 8 pins, this is for the stepper motor, the heater cartridge, the thermistor, and 2 fans.
stepper motor is 4 pins and you canā€™t do anything about that so thatā€™s 4 left.
iā€™m guessing everything left is on a shared ground (which is not really a great idea for thermistors but hey)
so thatā€™s 3 left, + for thermistor, + for heater cartridge, and + for fans.

this is where you might be going ā€œhey, but thatā€™s a separate circuit! you can control the speed!ā€ and yeah, you can do that, but it will change the speed on the part cooling fan AND the heatbreak cooling fan at the same time, which is a really bad idea.

you miight be able to get away with putting a variable resistor in there and manually adjusting the part cooling fan, but thatā€™s extremely crufty and you (and by you i mean snapmaker) miiight be able to put ā€œall fans off if thermistor reading is <50cā€ in there, and i hope they can and do

There is no real part cooling fan. There are two fans on the printing module. One is a tiny fan on the bottom. It is blowing straight up at the stepper motor. Most likely because they are running the stepper motor rather hot. The second is the one blowing across at the heat break. This exhausts downwards toward the part. However any major cooling it would do is being lost by cooling the heat break.

Are you sure about this? That would be a bummerā€¦ Controling print part cooling is essential to getting good prints. I cannot believe Snapmaker team made such an oversightā€¦ I mean, missing speed control might be kindof OK, but an ā€œoffā€/ā€œonā€ would be minimum requirementā€¦

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EDIT: Apologies! I have not seen that this post is on Snapmaker Original!

@CthulhuLabs Sorry to say this, but you are quite wrong. I fired up my A350 and tried the following commands while holding my finger beneath the air guide:

M106

  • Sets Fan on full speed --> Air flow clearly present

M107

  • Fan off --> Air flow gone

M106 Sxxx

  • xxx anything between 0-255 - 0 = off, 255 full blow. Try 255 and then 200, you can feel the difference.

In other words: Snapmaker did a good job and has adjustable print cooling, which is what I would have expected. Good job!

My snapmaker original does not have fan control which is very disappointing. I get no reaction when using M106, M107 or M106 Sxxx.

@parachvte @Jade This is why we want open sourcing, amongst many other reasons. Iā€™ve just updated the cooling to a new blower fan, and then found it canā€™t be speed controlled :person_facepalming:
The originals are very capable small machines, Iā€™ve got two of them (and an A350), but the original machines are hamstrung by old firmware / design decisions and should be open-sourced like originally promised. Even if that is just uncommented nightmare code, and schematics in chinese, weā€™d have as much information as you have, and you could wash your hands of any future requests!
What a new years gift that would be :fireworks: :rabbit:

Iā€™ve just modified both my printers, one with the octoprint Gpio Fan Controller OctoPrint-GpioFanController
and one which has the Pi futher away is now activating the fan and speed control over mqtt, story follows:

Iā€™ve stuck a tiny ESP32 on the toolhead, with a ULN2003 attached (darlington pair of transistors) to drive the 24V blower fan via PWM. Its the adafruit QTPYs2, with a uln2003a board from the cheap stepper motors, which Iā€™d already broken out all 7 channels, and Iā€™m robbing 4.8v 800mA from an old LG charger. Iā€™ve got a 24V 0.1A blower fan stuck on the front of the device which has replaced the old fan via the JST-XH connector.

It kind of started due to thinking of the Automation Phat for the Pi (which has 24v tolerant outputs via a ULN2003) that could be used with the octoprint GpioFan plugin, and then after thinking of the wiring I thought a tiny esp using the 24v supply driven by mqtt, but Iā€™m waiting for a decision on an efficient and small 24v to 5v converter.

Got lazy and asked ChatGPT to do the basic arduino sketch to get the json key fanspeed from the mqtt topic, then after fixing that (lol) we were mostly there. I ended up with a problem with retained messages, but after turning that off in octoprint mqtt plugin all should be well. Iā€™ve set the topic to be timedTrigger, but I include the fanspeedChanged topic commented out if youā€™d prefer (fanspeedChanged topic is quicker to respond but wonā€™t survive the esp32 crashing whereas timedTrigger will).