I don’t believe the snapmaker extruder has a dedicated fan for hot end cooling.
I have had some experience with TEC’s (thermo electric coolers) in my astrophotography hobby.
do you think a battery operated TEC (for proof of concept) to cool the intake air at the extruder may have a significant affect on the bridging capabilities. it might be possible to print an exhaust nozzle or flexible tubing very close to the hot end nozzle and make it a dedicated cooler . would i have complications with it being too cold. Hard to imagine high end printers don’t use something like this . simple temp adjustment might not be too tough. G-code incorporation slicer addons "Wheeeewh"not my bailiwick .
It won’t work for the same reason putting a toaster in the freezer doesn’t prevent bread from toasting. It’s a wattage issue.
I also have an astrographastrophotography setup and the cameras are built like a refrigerator so there’s a very small amount of heat that needs to be removed.
The hot end heater cartridge is something like 30W. A TEC in the ballpark of 30W of heat removal is absolutely enormous compared to the space it needs to operate in.
Also, the temperature of the filament coming out is ~200C. Blowing room temperature air (20C) and blowing freezing air (0C) is essentially the same temperature delta. You need more airflow. Doubling the airflow is way way easier than doubling the temperature gradient (you’d need -200C air).
Thats what i wanted to hear . I wasn’t aware of how much cooling was necessary to improve the bridging at least a significant amount, I will check settings in cura. to see if it varies or just runs 100% all the time.
my bridging wasn’t terrible on this test ( at least it made them all) but definitely center thickness variations got worse as the bridges got longer. had some issues on 3dbenchy but i ran it really fast.
My astrophotography was on the cheep so i was retrofitting dslr’s to reduce thermal noise , took me quite a while to get a low end cooled camera. right now my equipment is tied up in a divorce. good stuff is a lot cheaper now so maybe I’ll just start over.
But I just finished an exposure of M51 last week, work in progress. Only stacked and color corrected so far, this is essentially unprocessed. Thanks SCTs for that wonderful coma from mirror flop
OMG you do beautiful work M81 is extremely good . and the monochrome of the whirlpool has tons of data just waiting to be teased out. you said astrograph and you said mirror flop is it a RASA don’t RC’s have fixed mirrors. I’d love to know what scope , camera and mount your using? How many exposures and what exposure times .
I have some ideas that I’m going to try for the bridging I’m just not going to talk about them until I have some results.
Originally I used a Nikon d810 (that I’ve had for years and years way prior to astronomy) with a sigma 600mm lens. It works poorly lol. Primarily because Nikon’s USB control is buggy and unreliable. Canon seems much better in that sense.
I had a cheap Craigslist Celestron C8 from the early 2000s laying around so that’s what I’m using right now. Asi294mc pro camera. Zwo eaf autofocuser. 60mm guide scope with an Orion ssag pro camera. Everything mounted on a losmandy d side by side adapter from adm on an Orion atlas pro az/eq-g mount.
All of the instruments run to a Pegasus pocket power box advance for power distribution, USB hub and dew heater control which then runs to an Intel compute stick all mounted on the ADM side by side. Power supply is a salvaged 12 volt battery charger from work.
The software I have installed on the compute stick includes EQ mod for the telescope pointing model, sharp cap for doing polar alignment and other camera measurements, and primarily sequence generator pro for acquisition. Cartes du Ciel and Stellarium for planetarium.
I will remote desktop into the compute stick from a laptop in the house and run everything remotely.
For processing I use pixinsight.
The Celestron c8 has a movable mirror that allows it to shift under gravity and at the long focal length is actually causing some significant issues for me right now. I’m looking at getting a GSO style 10-in RC. It will require me completely redoing just about every part of the system though, so I’m still thinking through everything. Will probably add a filter wheel with at least a blanking filter so I can automate dark capture. I would also really like a rotator for better framing of certain targets. Then at that point I might as well just buy a new monochrome camera with a full filter wheel setup. But that all costs too much money. So to be decided.
I live in a class 4 Bortle area, and with the low read noise of the asi294mc camera the optimum exposure (calculated by sharp cap) is in the ballpark of 90s.
The m81 target I took around 400 images (10 hours) but ended up rejecting around half in pixinsight due to poor quality, mainly from mirror flop caused issues.
For m51 I took subs over 3 days so I have around 600 subs, but after filtering for quality that was reduced to 380 (~9 hours integration time final).
Even still I think the coma is worse so even with the large amounts of data they overall quality of the stars is not better than m81. M81 is higher in the sky and less affected by mirror flop. M51 is more towards my horizon so there’s really significant shifts throughout the imaging session. Overall fwhm is bigger on m51 than m81 and also eccentricity is significantly worse. But the large number of shots allows for extremely low noise after integrating and also because I dither in PHD2 every 5 frames I got a very good resulting drizzled image.
Your should check out this lecture by Dr Robin Glover if you haven’t seen it about optimum imaging length in 2 parts):
Just realized I’ve been misusing ‘astrograph’. I thought it referred to the intended function of the entire imaging system, not just the OTA. Not sure my $250 craigslist scope qualifies lol. Whatever I’m still new to this. Only on my 3rd year now. Pretty proud of what the wife and I have been able to achieve in a short time.
well i know that scope well. I have a 6 and an 8 . my 8 got some water damage so I had to "rebuild it " clean the mirror , re-black the tube ,but cleaning and using super lube on the tube where the mirror slides helped with the mirror flop quite a bit and I read somewhere to CW past your focus CCW back to focus helps also but your using an autofocuser don’t remember if there is a setting for that. I went cheap on that too built one from a stepper motor i had laying around , an arduino nano and a BT module. hey it would autofocus. last things i bought were a cgem ( not the 2 ) mount and a nightscape 8300 don’t laugh they were on sale. I did everything remote but with an old laptop , worked from my old ugly motorhome that i took places you should never drive a class A motorhome to. I live in Portland oregon so no one knows that stars exist here . I did “practice” in my backyard collected a lot of ancient photons and there were some at least i thought were pretty nice to look at. when everyone compares to Hubble its hard to measure up. My C8 was fastar compatible I was going to get a Hyperstar
but that nightscape was a pretty big obstruction for an 8 to spend that kind of money but andromeda and orion at f2 would have been fun. if you like coma just use a focal reducer . It was a lonely hobby for me my 2 boys and my wife weren’t interested. I’m 62 now don’t know if i’ll ever get back into it , but i sure do miss it. I can tell your hooked and it is rewarding in ways a lot of people don’t understand. Your good at it too so that helps.
trying to keep my brain working with the 3D printing. sure wish i had a 3D printer when i was working on my setup I would have DIY’d a lot of things.
I would love to see more of your work . Hope you find the money and time to build that new rig .it would be worth it.
Sorry about the grammar just hated it in school should have paid more attention.
Thanks for the help on the bridging we will see what i can do to make it less.
