Overview
After building my 3D printer enclosure, I ran into the issue of my printer enclosure getting too warm. Temperatures during extended prints were climbing above 130 degrees Fahrenheit, which was causing my printer electronics to overheat, leading to extrusion issues and missed steps. I remedied this by propping the door open with a rag, but that removed the noise damping benefit of the enclosure. An overcomplicated but fun solution in the form of a PID fan controller was devised. This controller uses and Arduino nano to PWM control a logic-level N-channel MOSFET that feeds into a low-pass filter in order to control a 12V radial blower fan with a varying analog voltage. Bit-shifting in the Arduino Nano code takes advantage of the built-in timers in the Atmel Atmega 328p processor in order to generate PWM frequencies at 25kHz, which is outside the range of human hearing and thus less annoying. Initial attempts to control the fan using straight PWM without a low-pass filter proved to be unreliable, but the current setup with the low-pass filter has been running strong for over 6 months as of the writing of this post.
Code
Parts List
Pictures
