I installed the boosted enclosure fan, which does its job indeed much better than the stock fan. Downside is a turbine-like whine when it runs as opposed to the more good-natured hum of the stock fan. Looking into the GCode wiki, it states that you can control the fan speed with
M1010 S4 P<n>
n being a value between 0-100 (i.e. % of max speed).
So far so good, but my fan reacts not very well to that. Around P70 or lower it does not run at all. P75 up is indeed slow to fast, but the slow end is already pretty fast and noisy.
Do you have different experiences? Any tipps to get it a bit less whiny?
A whining fan usually means it’s being restricted. It’s not able to pull in enough fresh air and it’s causing turbulence and restriction. Maybe try adding 2-3mm TPU spacer feet under the enclosure to allow it to draw more air? I had to do that when I added an inline 4" ventilator fan. Specifically this one because it came out cheaper than buying the boosted fan + shipping. So now I use the stock and inline fan.
When the inline fan comes on, the poor enclosure fan just begins spinning at max speed with how much air is being drawn through it. I can’t hear the inline fan running though, it’s super quiet after adding some spacers.
For control, I have both the inline fan, and the snapmaker on Kasa smart plugs, so if I yell at my smart speaker to turn on the snapmaker, it turns them both on so it’s pretty seamless.
Another reason for whining would be; bad bearings. It could be you simply got a dud, which would also explain why you can’t get it to move on power lower than 70%. There’s not enough starting torque to overcome the drag of the bearings.
You can test the flow by turning the fan on max and opening the door, if it’s still making the noise with full breathing door flow, then I’d lean toward bearings. However, if the blade design is bad, that could likely cause a whining turbulence. Provide a short video if you can?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and your experience with the inline fan! I think turbulence/restriction can be ruled out in my case, since the whine is there even with doors wide open. I would go so far to say that the whine is a necessary evil - with the boosted fan Snapmaker had to chose a fan model that pushes much more air through the same diameter. Comments in the reviews and at other places say the same, it sounds like a turbine. The fan itself seems to be a good quality one - the fan blades are metal! This makes them comparitively heavy, and if you switch the fan on, it takes two seconds or so until full RPM are reached. The sound is not that of squeky bearings, but high RPM pitched noise, so my gut feeling says it is a property of the model.
The heavy blades may be the reason why you need to put in enough energy and 70% is somewhat the lower limit. And with that they spin slower and less noisy, but still annoyingly high pitched.
I’ll see when I can take a video.
Maybe it still is, just on the other side. Try removing the hose and turning the fan on. Could be too much back pressure from the hose not allowing enough flow. Either too long, too many curves, or just the pleating of it being a flex hose.
Otherwise, yeah, might just be a ‘feature’ of the fan. ;p
My boosted fan is also a turbine. I just enable it while lasering and then I normally run my air compressor too which is also very loud. So it is okay for me.
Yep, Starting airplane and then turbine … I still dont understand why to this day there is no slider in enclosure controll screen for that if that functionality is already available trough gcode as it seems … I wish Snapmaker realy focused on software one day.
No… Honestly, I never tried to control the fan beyond manually switching it on or off. Typically, I do not run laser jobs unattended - at least not if flamable materials are involved - so I can switch the fan off when the job is done.
That said, it would be very easy to have the fan control in the GCode - add M1010 S4 P100 in the beginning, and M1010 S4 P0 at the end, perhaps with a wait command before that tomallow the smoke to be fanned out - that would be G4 S60 for a 60 sec. wait.
I actually have this in a separate profile. I have a “long run” or “overnight” profile for projects that’ll take like, 12 hours or more. In the header I use M1010 S3 10 to set the enclosure LEDs to dim, and M1010 S4 100 to set the fan to max. After it runs, I have the following at the end of the gcode file;
This sets the enclosure brightness to max, then turns of off and on, blinking the enclosure light 5 times to indicate it’s done. (if I happen to be around/up to notice). If I’m not, it waits 5 minutes before turning the fan and LEDs off. Finally the M18 turns the steppers off to reduce power draw on idle.
Try removing the hose and turning the fan on. Could be too much back pressure from the hose not allowing enough flow. Either too long, too many curves, or just the pleating of it being a flex hose.
… I still dont understand why to this day there is no slider in enclosure controll screen for that if that functionality is already available trough gcode as it seems … I wish Snapmaker realy focused on software one day.