How to make sure your 3D printer won't catch fire!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 ส.ค. 2021
- Basic thermal protection is a feature that has been available in the standard 3D printer firmwares for a long time and it does a great job of protecting its heater elements when the temperature readings stop making sense. But as it turns out, some manufacturers don't bother to test that they are actually working. So here's how you can test you own machine - it only takes a couple of minutes!
Read the article to this video here:
toms3d.org/2021/08/20/test-yo...
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2:08 very subtle Rickroll there
Yes, yes Rick Roll hehe
Hawkeye Johnny is your real name, isn't it?
My printer doesn't have any legs, so I don't need to worry about it running away. The hotend sure does make a lot of smoke though.
Hello? Is your refrigerator running?? Better go catch it.. Hahaha
Just throw a cheeseburger on it and get that fresh grilled flavor… cheeseburger boy will like that.
@@stonefarmer3005 The ABS smoke adds flavor!
I'm pretty confident that this is one of those videos you make that is going to age very well and be useful for years to come.
Love your radio station choices! Love the analogy for thermal run away! Glad to see a video on this! The industry needs more awareness!
Oh the industry knows. Or at least the devs, designers and manufacturers do, and the (re)sellers very rarely touch firmware or make product alterations - they just buy, sell, ship. Many even just dropship - meaning they never even had the product in possession.
Primary issue is sloppyness and severe corbercutting, by people that mostly know better (bluntly, they'd never buy or use that product themselves, because of those same shortcuts). That's makes the whole thing so much more worse and insidious IMO. It's not exactly cutting baby formula with melamine, but it's much of the same mindset.
@@pr0xZen Oh the devs know, it feels like a bit of "we know but we just do not care." Corner cutting for SURE. If you are trying to compete to the bottom safety will have to give eventually! I just hope we do not go through more Anet BS before things get fixed..
These thumbnails have leveled up recently 😆
I ( Couch..Finally) unpacked my Replicape today and started installing the firmware on the Beaglebone. During the upgrade I watched this video. Found it one of the "Share directy to friends" type.
Guess what the first warning/Error message was, Octoprint gave me after the initial install:
"MCU 'host' shutdown: ADC out of range - This generally occurs when a heater temperature exceeds."
Just having seen your video, this made me smile, as now I knew the reason, I had nothing connected yet to the Replicape and the software reported a temperature problem. Perfect Timing of your video.
Perfect analogy for thermal runaway, and those are some top-notch compositing skills! 😂
Not to mention the subtle Rick Roll
I bought my first FDM printer for only $119. It is Mega Zero from Anycubic, Thermal runaway control in this is working so well that even when I had my thermistor just bit out from its appropriate spot, making it measure a bit less in temperature rise than the printer expected while heating up the hot-end, it shows thermal runaway error. I guess every brand has its own flaws in their printers. I’m just glad it is the other way around in mine. By the way your videos are great Tom, very professional and helpful. Thanks for making them. Keep it up!
This is a good PSA for anyone with a 3D Printer. Keep up the good work!
Thank you for this. I got in to a discussion on the reddit about how the Voxel isn't safe because of this. But people always retorted with it can be fixed in 5min with a firmware flash. Which is true, but most people aren't going to be aware of it as way too many TH-cam/online reviews just don't mention it so a buyer who just watches those reviews would not know about this issue.
Yes so many have bought 3D printers that cant even do basic stuff like check the oil in their car or change a light bulb.
@@MostlyInteresting I guess I am in that boat. My printer can't check its oil. Dumb printer....
@@JoshuaJayG …Hey, you are right! Checked mine, BOTH failed… can’t check the oil, and didn’t change that burned-out build in the computer room.
🥸
Oh, and they couldn’t bring me a cold beer, either…
thanks for doing a concise video and not speaking nonsense to just fill the 10 min for max youtube algorithm love
Thanks for showing this. I just got an Aquila X2, and it passed all 3 tests.
H32 with firmware v5.1.5
There should be a list of printer models detailing which of those 3 thermal runaway tests they passed.
Very useful testing procedure. Thanks for sharing
This is relevant even today so many people getting 3d printers now and most of them dont know anything about this sort of thing
Its wonderful to see this being bought up! Imo should be minimum standard for a consumer printers to have at-least thermal run away protection. I have a modified cr-10s that has thermal run away protection on a 240v heated bed with a thermal fuse and a seperate earth wire attached to the bed and ssr. I still have it in a aluminium and cement board box with smoke alarm and don’t leave it un attended
Eah, agree.
But all electrical equipment should be supervised.
We have dozens of devices in our homes that are constantly powered, and all it takes is a small mistake in their design 20 years ago, a slightly thinner wire, fold of the extension cable or a bump while transporting them and we could lose our house and our lives.
Monitoring is the safest and easiest nowadays (unlimited mobile data, video server from an old mobile phone).
_______
but it's nice to have the extra safety features.
Damn, I was hoping to see Thomas operating a fire extinguisher... Maybe next time haha, very informative video!
This is why, as soon as I got my Anet A6 2 years ago, I chucked the electronics out and put my trusty Arduino Mega + Marlin + RAMPS 1.4.
Sometimes I forget the printer is not powered by mains but the electronics is still powered by the USB port, and I try to heat the nozzle, I get the thermal run away message.
Good to know it works. If I'm not mistaken, Octoprint also has thermal runaway feature built in.
Thank you for making this video.
I've checked my Ender 3 v2 when I got it, and checked it again after upgrading to Jyer's firmware. I also replaced the hot end with all-metal, as to not have a chance of any fumes from a burning PTFE tube.
Those compositing skills though! Had me like 👀
Great topic, thanks 👍
"The printer may damage itself or the environment it is in." Someone's been learning from air force incident report writers.
I built a hypercube printer myself, I used to have a lot of thermal runaway issues.
in my case I managed to fix it by making a shielded wire for the thermal sensor as it seemed to be influenced by other wires all fed through the same in the cablechain
it was a pain to get the printer to stop doing thermal runaway but at least I know my safeties work ;)
I've had issues too with thermal runaway, but sometimes it's just a bit too tight tolerances on default values.
You don't really need to worry if the hotend varies ~5°c from the target, but when things get 20°c out of range then it sure as heck fell out. On another occasion, I had a bad PID tune and the part cooling fan blew it too cold even with a silicone sock, that also triggered the safety.
Excelent as usual!!!
Another good video, but what are the steps to rectify the issues? Firmware update from manufacture? Or just overwrite it?
You know I’d love to see printer boards with jumpers or buttons that allow for runaway testing without unwiring, allowing for routine testing.I mean, it’s a potentially crappy idea as it’s another component and potential point of failure, but also maybe a good way to differentiate junky printers from good ones?
None of these constructions are enough. There should be additional bimetallic fuse that is independent of anything and trips off slightly over usable temperature! This is how safe devices are made! It’s bad that we have to check anything and the basic first stage protection isn’t even working apparently in some cases. There are actually two circuits that need such protection: hot end and bed heater. Other solution is to design machine so that even if regulation totally fails the heated element will be balanced so that will be able to stabilise itself at temperature that will not make fire at any conditions.
Hey Thomas...dig your videos! Have you heard anything about thermal runaway issues with Voxelab (ender 3) when ONLY printing while connected to Octoprint? Jobs print fine when printing from SD card and no Octoprint?
I just had a thermal runaway on the ender3v3se and the safety features worked beautifully. It smoked a lot but it shut off almost immediately after the thermistor failed.
"honest officer I could not have been speeding, my car was clearly reading -20"
Hi Thomas,
Great and useful info. But there is additional one very tricky situation: shorted/broken heater mosfet.
If your mosfet will be broken it will become like a simple jumper and not switch anymore. And if even Marlin firmware will notice that something wrong it will not help, because after switching ON printer 12/24v from PSU will appear immediately at heater.
As solution it could be used master relay that will cut off completely PSU from AC.
P/S I Am owner of MK3s, and I ask these question of their hotline, so they say that it is not recommended to keep printer alone because of these :). And of course MK3s do not have master relay/master mosfet.
P/S P/S I am repair engineer at factory and all new modern certified equipment has this master relay to prevent fire or health hazards.
i use thermal fuse under the bed that cuts off the main voltage if bed runs above 125c. it runs on 230AC through an (genuine) omron ssr relay. need to figure out something for hotend
@@j.g545 good solution, but not perfect. For example MK3s has very tight wire management at extruder head, and adding of thermal fuse will create a lot of mess
At work, one of the RF2000's hot ends melted down on me. In this case, the holding plate of the parts cooler had bent and cut and connected a cable from the heating element against the housing, i.e. ground. Since the heating elements are switched on the low side, the hotend was permanently heated. In this case the firmware could not intervene because the mosfet was completely bypassed.
Make sure you do the right thing when unplugging/plugging something from the running Printer.
I once shorted the power pins of a fan with a pair of tweezers, which resulted in a blown fuse on the mainboard.
And the often used LittleFuse SMD fuses are hard to get for a reasonable price if you don't want to buy a whole bunch of them.
Anet A8 had the thermal runaway issue, but they fixed it in A8 plus. Now it has protection, which I checked :)
Thanks for the good knowledge! Still, I've had a broken mosfet that it shorted out and luckily, my home assistant server was configured and able to turn off the printer's power supply 😀. It was on a SKR V2 mini installed on an Ender 5. Really lucky me. Do you know if maybe the Octoprint is able to do this by its own? I have the Octoprint Relay plug in but i did not saw this feature. Again, thank you!
I had the thermal runaways protection kick in on my prusa MK3S. The thermistor on the heat bed was pulled away from the bed during a PETG print. The PETG go so hot that it melted into the powder coated print sheet. One side is completely ruined as it has no more powder coating on it. Luckily that is all that happened.
Issue was because I did not secure the wires properly during assembly.
Any printer without that feature should not get a passing review on any channel!
This is one of many reasons I flash and set up Marlin myself... Don't trust the OEM FW.
A better level of protection is the octoprint plugin for the TP link smart plugs. You can add thermal runaway settings, i.e. if it drops below 5c or goes above 300 for example it will cut power to the printer completely, not relying on the printer's software.
But that only works if the thermistor on the printer works, and the printer firmware doesn't crash. While it may be an additional layer of protection, I wouldn't call it a better one. The best way is to fix the printer to prevent the problem altogether, not react when it happens.
@@AlAmantea If the thermistor didn't work it would drop to -15 and therefore cut off. It is a better layer of protection because the thermal runaway protection in Marlin only tells the board to stop heating. What if there is a board fault and it just continuously heats anyway? For example some SSRs fail in the open position meaning it continues to heat and never stops.
Octoprint replies on the printer to be reliable enough to send it the thermal data before it can do anything about it. If the printer fails and doesn't see the problem, or locks up and can't report it to Octoprint, then absolutely nothing would be done about it, because Octoprint doesn't know there's a problem. Not a better solution IMHO. Why not solve the issue in the firmware correctly, instead of relying on a third party as a watchdog after the fact?
@@AlAmantea *sigh* nevermind bro. You carry on doing you :thumbs up:
An alternate, although not fool proof, way of testing is to remove any silicon sock on your heat block and then heat up your hot end. Then take a large adjustable spanner and clamp it on to the heat block. This should suck away enough heat to trigger thermal run away protection. A little easier that opening up the printer and removing wires.
Good old Anet a8 froze and left the heaters on. Filled the room with smoke, when rebooted it showed 440c. Now i have a smoke detector next to my printers and never leave the house while they're working.
Putting Marlin on the Anet A8 takes 15 minutes. It has all safety features mentioned in the video and auto level abilities. There is absolutely no excuse not doing that. There is also no reason to babysit a 3D printer if all safety features are enabled.
Nice composite in the car.
Another (very easy) test you can do is to grab the heated nozzle with a pair of metal pliers. If I do this on my printer, an error message pops up on the screen after a few seconds alerting me that heating has failed. The pliers act as a heat sink, quickly drawing heat away from the nozzle. If the printer detects that it is taking way too much energy to keep the nozzle heated, then it should fail and stop heating. First time I noticed this was when I was heat tightening down a new nozzle and had the pliers/wrench touching the heater block and nozzle for too long.
I got an older Ender 3 a few years ago back when Creality didn't ship them with thermal runaway protection in the modified Marlin firmware. Their janky "power off recovery" was terrible and destroyed cheaper MicroSD cards in my experience so I flashed it with standard Marlin to make sure my printer didn't burn my house down. Even back then this was considered to be an idiotic move from Creality.
So what printer would you recommend? i was thinking about the ender 3 V2 anyway seems to be the best choice now
3:50 on some printers motherboards shorting termistor channel can burn it to death. You are doing it at your own.
My thermistor wires broke and shorted setting fire to the fabric cable sleeve a while back. That was disconcerting but luckily I was there
I have a first run Aquila with stm processor...I did the tests an the machine did what it is suppose to. It stopped heating and gave a message. I think its related to the followup processors they used because of the lack of original ones in the moment.
Thanks!
Thank you!
my CR-200B actually displays a heating error even when just having the silicone sock off the hotned (was changing the nozzle) so yeah creality seems to be doing a good job at making sure their printers don't catch fire randomly haha
This is why when I bought my cheap Anet A6, I took out the main board and replaced it with Mega 2560 and RAMP 4.1 running Marlin.
You never know what they use for their firmware.
Im watching this video after i bought the ender 3 v2 and I'm happy that this one is a bit more safe than the other one
@02:22 When the _V-Tec_ kicks in... That or the equivalent of Civilization's Ghandi nuking you to Kingdom Kong when you researched too much Diplomacy 🤣
Mine is so aggressive that it goes off without the silicone sock over the hotend and honestly I'm happy with that
What I do is take a spare thermistor and plug it into the board but leave the sensor in open air, turn on the heater. It obviously will show no change in hotend temp which should trip thermal run away.
thomas, do you know by experience if the duet boards come with thermal runaway protection enabled by default?
Duet's Reprapfirmware has all checks enabled out of the box 👍
The Aquila at least can serve as aluminium extrusion donor
Why are you Rick Rolling me with the song selection in your vehicle? 😜
Hay Tom I have always wondered why the I/O isn't fused on the 3d printers there realy is no excuse. In a industrial setting all I/O on a PLC is fused for protection to the operator and equipment for something that costs penny's they should be added also thermal protection should be added, also there should be no plastic parts on something that can catch fire
Quite right, it’s hard to believe they are still shipping printers like this.
I've actually been considering upgrading my hotend, but I'm not sure with all the choices. I print mostly PLA and transitioning to print PETG. Any recommendations?
Does your current hotend have problems (or like PTFE lined so not so much recommended) with temperatures on the 250ºc range? I'm printing PETG at 240°c here so I would say you don't need anything too fancy, I'm just using a clone all metal V6 from Aliexpress and it really does a remarkably fine job, no clogs or such and up to 100mm/s with 0.6mm trace on 0.4mm nozzle extrudes well through a clone Titan, talking about PETG here, as PLA is easier even, and no issues on ABS either.
The one thing you gotta do tho is tighten it up while hot, before feeding filament. I didn't and had a leak at 1st, plus the heatsink fan is load as heck (at least compared to my PC which I'm used to).
My CR10S Pro has never had thermal runaway, even on updated software. Same with BOTH of my Tenlog TL-D3s. The companies don't give a crap about people.
damm tom i was hoping to see you hit the magic 88 miles an hour and jump back to the future lol
The article for this vid is not published or bad link.
Yeah... Mine was tripping non stop so i guess i have a protection... (I modified the firmware to make it less sensitive a few days ago)
I’m looking to get a 3D printer what do you recommend?
Hi Thomas. Just one to maybe add or talk about. My ender3 onboard relay somehow got stuck in the on position. Although the board thought it could switch it on and off it was actually just heating up every time I switched the printer on. I replaced the board. Not sure if this ever happened to anyone.
Had a thermal runaway once. The protection was on and it triggered but the failure was on the board itself so it kept heating up. I now have a mechanical relay that cut off all power in case it happen again.
Yeah I think PS_ON control is a very good idea in conjunction.
Well makes me feel better about my Ender 3 V2
Why would you feel bad, that's a nice printer lol.
I have prusa and i trust it.
Compositing skills are top noch. Somebody did watch some Andrew Kramer.
My Ender 5 Plus actually has the problem that when its to cold (less then 5°C) it will go into Thermal error mode. So if its especally cold in the surounding area, i have to preheat the printer to get it above that temp :D Yes i know would be better to have the Printer in a heated area but i just dont have the space for it.
🤣 Thomas hitting lvl 999
My part cooling fans (on MK3S) set on full speed drop nozzle temperature that leads to "thermal runaway" problem.
But how are those Safety features not working? Marlin has them enabled by default you mentioned. Did the manufacturer disable it? Or were bugs introduced in the system?
Big reason I love my all metal printer is safety and rigidity. Not sure why plastic extruders and plastic covered hotends are popular. I get there's some cash saved but it's not a good feature.
Very happy with my Ender 3v2, made some mistakes putting in a new main board which caused the thermal runaway error. Was just a simple fix of putting a ferrule on and putting the cable back in for better connection.
I did like your driving at speed however you did forget to change the mirror, We still see grass driving by at about 20 lol
My hotend is probably what broke my printer a while ago. The Teflon tube seem to be deformed and I can't remove it. There is gunk all over the hotend nowadays as well.
I wonder if a modern hotend replacement works on my platform and could resurrect it.
What printer do you have? An e3d v6 is always a good option or a kp3s titan extruder if the budget is tight. The kp3s titan is intended for use on an mgn12 linear rail with a C block but some modification will make it fit anything you want to mount it on. You can't go wrong with the kp3s titan, because it's only $21 USD on ebay right now. I have one mounted on my Cetus MK1 and I'll be installing a genuine all metal e3d v6 to replace the teflon lined clone that was included.
Hope you don't mind me asking, but where's the fire hazard with having a wire/circuit _break_ in the heater cartridge? Or is that failure mode more about preventing other damage, to hotend/heatbreak, extruder etc?
If you are talking about the first test he did - disconnecting the heater wires:
As he said that is a catch all test.
Disconnecting the heater wires has the same result as a fallen out temperature sensor.
@@Jehty21 No I meant connection break on the heater cartridge. Either wire, connector or on PCB. One of the two conductors broken. So either no +12/24v or no ground lead going to the heater cartridge. Ie, no more complete circuit to power the cartridge.
There is one thing I've encountered that I haven't seen any way to prevent. In 2013, I had a Melzi 2.0 board that had the gate leg of the power mosfet controlling the extruder heater fail, resulting in thermal runaway just by plugging in the board. I had to replace the entire hot end, since the aluminum heater block melted enough to prevent anything from being pulled out of it. This kind of a problem can't be solved through firmware, which is why I'm uncomfortable leaving my printer alone even with the protections it does have.
God you would think they would of sorted this out after all these years .
newbees wouldnt no difference nice one tom..
Has anyone tested these safety features on the Longer LK5 Pro?
Is there anything we can do if our printer fails any of these tests? New fw versions, looking up marlin settings, etc?
I don't think Marlin lets you enable the features without a full reflash. Community firmware builds most often have the checks enabled and working.
The Aquila depending what version chip you have can use a community firmware from alex (known publicly just as alexs firmware for the aquila)that has thermal runway enabled ...does it work or not I cannot confirm personally... simply as I have not done the actual install .... however from my understanding it can be done for all aquila's not using the h32 chip ....
I have changed the heater cartridge and thermistor and still get the E1 error. Not sure What is wrong will try to update the firmware, currently it’s 2.0.8. Any suggestions thanks.
Aren't those safety features enabled by default if I downloaded a new marlin setup and flashed it? If they are, then that would mean those companies would have had to turn the safety features off to begin with, I would think.
If you flash a fresh firmware from scratch, all the safety features should be enabled as that's the default. Still do test them, though, as in the Aquila's case they seemed to be active, but the firmware then crashed when it tried to deal with the fault.
My 6 year old anet has the runaway protection :D
Does the thermistor and the control board ever get out of sync? I.E. nothing is wrong with the thermistor, but the control board temperature reading is wrong.
Wow. How do you essentially clone a device a miss out stuff like this?
999 kmh you wish :-) had an old car with analog Display - that really tried to rotate the speedometer to -20 kmh in reverse :-) i have to admit - nice rendering (resolve ? )
yeah test it.. short the fet that is powering the heatbed (it's common for fet to fail in short) and watch how software thermal runaway can't do anything about it unless you have separate psu shut off - which you don't.
OMG that Agila... 03:21 both were switched on at the same time, Ender beebs but the Agila doesn't do that
Love the music choice
Did someone tried with Artillery Genius ?
2:13 - is that an electric 208?
That visual Rick-roll though
i get heater fault often and if i reset the error it works and then again it happen what can it be / ?
The printer needs to be safe even if the software isn't involved, eg the mosfet for the heater shorts. If the printer catches fire by continued heating, it's designed wrong.
My ender 3 pro didn't have thermal runaway protection...the thermistor wire broke, thankfully octoprint stopped the print.
5:55 option 4) they didn't design safety features in.