Extruder Altimeter

thingiverse

This is stupid, but that's the charm, right? For giggles, I made a 'working' altimeter for the back of my direct-drive extruder motor, 'working' in that the needle spins with the motor. Looking at the blank back of the extruder motor wasn't cutting it for me. Pretty simple overall - just a bezel outline, a face printed on a laser printer, and a needle that pokes through to attach to the hub of the extruder motor. Sized to perfectly fit any 42mm wide stepper motor. Check the depth of the hub from the back face of the stepper motor - mine (the packaged Creality Direct-drive unit) was about 2.5mm deep, but the previous one was 3.4mm. I've included two needles with different length shafts, so hopefully you won't have to adjust or remix one. Print the altimeter face from either the PDF file (US 8.5x11 size, sorry to those that don't use this paper size) or AltimeterFace.jpg, full-size. Trim the paper at least outside the white outer bezel ring, or simply trim the corners to fit the bezel part you've printed - just be sure that it's centered. Cut out the inner needle-hub circle, or simply make an 'X' cut to poke the needle through. Attach the paper face to the back of the bezel, with either contact cement or double-stick tape, then attach these two pieces directly to the back of the extruder motor. Making sure that the adhesive is only on the very end of the needle shaft, poke the shaft through the paper face and attach it to the hub of the motor. I like contact cement better, but you do you. That's it, you're done. No, it does not measure how much filament you're using, since I simply stole the altimeter illustration from a webpage that's now defunct, so it's not 'calibrated' to the diameter of the feed roller. It doesn't even tell you that filament is feeding, so don't trust it. It's just there to look snazzy. Which it does. https://vimeo.com/805427654 Credit to <a href="https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2744359" target="_blank">alvaroalea</a> for the original bezel and needle, both altered for this trivial purpose.