Digital Filament Counter use Arduino

thingiverse

Ever wonder how much filament you actually used for a project? Do you have an old mechanical ball mouse lying around waiting to be recycled? Let's turn it into a filament counter with simple Arduino and 3D printed parts. The mechanical PS/2 mouse contains fairly high-resolution encoder wheels and a simple serial interface, as well as electronics to process the quadrature input signals from the encoder wheels. There are Arduino libraries written to talk to the mouse and get the direction of the distance of rotation of the encoder wheels. By connecting the encoder wheel to a filament roller, you can track the actual usage of the filament for each project using the Arduino and display the results in millimeters on an LCD display. Since the mouse outputs the relative position to its original position in both positive and negative directions, the counter is able to accurately measure and track the actual usage of the filament even when the filament direction is reversed occasionally. The mouse has two channels: X and Y. So far only X is used, but it can be easily extended with an additional channel, which would be handy for those who use dual-extrudes. Just print and assemble another sensor body and make a small circuit board to transplant the IR emitter and receiver to the second sensor body. The software is capable of reading the Y axis already; you just need to add some extra lines of code and maybe a Reset button to make it work. Now, this has basic functions, and implementation of jamming/print finished sensors are being considered if the wheel stops for an extended time, as well as interface with the printer firmware to pause the print or notify the user. Detailed instructions are available on Instructables: http://www.instructables.com/id/Digital-3D-Printer-Filament-Counter-Use-PS2-Mouse/. For the project, see https://hackaday.io/project/18804-coversion-of-ps2-mouse-to-filament-counter. See it in action: https://youtu.be/kwaZ24wySXI