Digital thermometer addon for Printrbot Simple Metal

thingiverse

I wanted to know the air temperature around the active printing area, so I bought a $2 digital aquarium thermometer and designed this thing around it. This Qooltek-branded thermometer from Amazon has the same nominal dimensions, so it should fit too. The thermometer body snaps into thermometer frame.stl, which screws into the side of the Simple Metal's gantry. You can re-use the stock screws, but I recommend replacing them with 12 mm M3 screws to accommodate the added thickness of the thermometer frame and make sure that the gantry pieces are still correctly fastened. The probe clip.stl snaps onto the body of the bed levelling probe. Put the probe wire into the hollow of the clip and use a small zip-tie to secure it in place. The metal in the probe does not interfere with bed levelling. Make sure that the height of the thermometer probe is equal to, or higher than, the base of the levelling probe to ensure that it doesn't strike the print. Printer Brand: Printrbot Printer: Simple Black Rafts: No Supports: No Resolution: 0.2 Infill: 20% How I Designed This Pretty straightforward build. This was my first time using a sliding bevel, and it worked out great. I used it to decide on the upward tilt angle of the thermometer frame by holding one arm level against the gantry and pointing the other arm towards my face until I felt like I was sighting straight down the edge of the arm. It turned out to be a neat 30°. If you look at the mounting holes on the thermometer frame, you'll notice that instead of two holes, I have one hole and one slot. The slot removes the annoying problem of having to design holes at the correct distance, which I seem to have a lot of problems with. The top hole is left circular because its job is to position the frame vertically along the gantry frame. I went through two iterations for the probe clip. My original idea was to have the probe wire sit loosely between two thin walls of plastic, and then the walls would be squeezed together with a small binder clip to hold everything tight. However, designing something flexible in such a small space (and vertically) was very difficult. I instead went with the current solution of a hollow + zip-tie, which is quite elegant anyway. Tinkercad source document: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/huXRVnSHlXp-thermometer-mount-for-pb-sm Changelog 12 Jul 2016: Added a radius to the corners of the thermometer frame because every time I reached behind my printer, the sharp corners would scratch my arm up.