Just another Spool Holder with Filament Feed Detector and Filament Depth Detector

thingiverse

I had pulled some new stainless steel bearings out of recycling and figured they would be a good base to work from to make a solid spool holder. This spool holder fits on the stock CR-10S spool bracket and it replaces the screw-on plastic holder provided by Creality. This holder also incorporates a quadrature encoder to determine spool motion and direction. This is to provide an alternate out of filament/filament break detector. This was born out of a filament break after the stock detector which went undetected on my printer. As long as the filament is being pulled from the spool, the detection circuit will provide the correct signal but once the spool is no longer rotating after a period of time (<30sec), it will trigger the out of filament signal to put the printer in a safe mode. [Edit] Added March 21st. A spool filament depth measurement arm which will allow an estimate of length of filament left on the reel by measuring the diameter left on the reel with 0m being the diameter of the bare inner reel. This uses a microcontroller to make that measurement the linear distance between the full reel and empty reel to estimate the amount of filament left and display it. To do: Need to complete a holder for a STM32 eval board that I have hanging around to use for the filament measurement and hold the motion detection circuit that is driven from the optical sensors.