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Ah 3d printing, who doesn’t love it, buying a 3000 dollar machine only to spend 100s of hours troubleshooting prints, tweaking variables buying expensive filament, only to end up printing the same ai slop articulated dragons over and over again and selling them on etsy just to cover the losses. Just kidding 3d printing is an amazing hobby you learn a lot of stuff about different materials, manufacturing, cnc and much more. but sometimes it does feel like every time you try to print something, theres a new issue, especially when your new to 3d printing, there are so many variables to set and they heavily depend on the material you use, the level of detail you want, the infill and also the geometry of model. so especially when you need something quickly it can be very frustrating when you wak up in the morning happy that your print is finished only to see that your printer has gone rouge and started printing is own abstract blob monster. thats why today i will show you how a fully 3d printed smart filament box can help you not only keep you filament dry and dust free but also live tune your print to get more reliable and cleaner prints. so come with me, my name is gabriel and on this channel we try and probably fail to simpLIFY AND IMPROVE on common issues around tech and everyday life and in the process learn a bit more about how things work. all my projects are open source and can be found on my website linked in the description bellow. so i you like that kinda stuff subscribe to this channel and give this video a like while your at it, thank you for the support and now lets jump back into video. one common issue if you print with materials like petg, tpu, nylon etc is moisture, this materials are hygroscopic meaning that they absorb moisture from surrounding air, this causes the moisture to evaporate when the filament is extruded which can lead to crackling and bubbles in milder cases and full clogs or failed prints when the moisture is high. thus come the filament dryers, wether you bake your filament in the oven, use a dehydrator, put your filament in a storage box with silica packs or buy a commercial filament dryer, they all do the same thing.

now you might be asking gabriel i am only printing with pla why do i care about drying and you ve got point materials like pla, abs, asa are less pron to absorbing a lot of moisture and can usually be printed without drying before even if they are siting out for a while. so in order to earn its keep we need to think further. on obvious benefit of keeping your filament in a box is that it stays clean and dust free but thats not enough, thats when i had the thought what if i put in some sensors that transmit their data to the 3d printer thus allowing the printer to tune and adapt to the properties of each individual roll of filament. first the obvious part a hydrometer and a thermometer, it can be used to warn you if the filament is to wet when you want to print something.