Tunell Filament Monitor - Source in Europe?

[reibuehl]

Hi all,

I would like to add a Tunell Filament Monitor to my UM2 but they seem to be only available in the US. International shipping starts at prices that are close to a flight ticket from Europe to the US
Does anybody know of a European shop that sells it?

Best regards,
Reiner

[LePaul]

Well I am here in the USA. What do they want for shipping? How big is this thing?

[reibuehl]

The thing should be roughly the size of a can of Coke but lighter and costs $65. They want between $45-$175 for shipping it to Germany while shipping for customers in the US is free.

[Neotko]

Just a bit outside the can answer.

http://sparklab-shop.de/parts/sparepart ... system?c=5

But I haven't found anyone using Marlin for this. Seems like it should do the trick...

[reibuehl]

Interesting... I will have a closer look on it. As long as it can produce a high -> low signal when something goes wrong, it should work with the UM2 and TinkerGNome Firmware.

[LePaul]

United States Postal Service, using the flat box rates....if it fits in a small box, should be about $25 USD. It doesn't look very big to me. If i can help, let me know.

[reibuehl]

Thanks for offering your help!

The sparklab sensor seems to work only in conjunction with some firmware modifications that provide data to the sensor. The tunell sensor seems to work standalone and only needs firmware support for a filament runout sensor.

[drayson]

Hmmm... Would this work at an umo too? There is some code in marlin for a filament sensor but I have no idea if it is usable.

[reibuehl]

TinkerGnome added the support for such a sensor - or a simpler, optical sensor that just detects filament/no filament - in his fork of the UM2 firmware. The changes do not look too complex, so as long as you have a free I/O pin on the UMO mainboard, it might be possible to also include this. In the UM2 it is fairly simple as the code just sends a pause command and then you can resolve the situation and restart the print yourself via the UM2 front panel. I assume this is much more complex for the UMO as it has AFAIK no UI, correct?

[martin-bienz]

reibuehl, but you can connect an ulticontroller to the UMO (which I guess most of us have done anyway). So the process could be the same for both printers (more or less).

[Amedee]

Yes there are available pins on the UMO and they are nicely exposed in a header, so that is not an issue. UMO+ has the Ultiboard 2, so that is fine as well.

From the firmware side, when you do SD-Card printing, we are exactly in the same case than with the UMO2. For USB printing it might be a bit more complex as the host software (Cura, OctoPrint, ...) need to collaborate.

[reibuehl]

Okay, then it shouldn't be an issue to use that one on the UMO too. The code I have seen mainly adds a function checkFilamentSensor(); to the manage_inactivity() funtion in Marlin_main.cpp. This function checks the pin where the sensor is connected and then uses lcd_print_pause() to pause the print.

[Amedee]

I think there are 3 different conversations here

1. Filament detector (end of spool): yes easy to do on UMO
2. Filament jamming detector (sparklab thing): looks nice from Repetier, as far as I know, no such thing in UM-Marlin
3. Measuring filament displacement for flow accuracy: experimental

I am not saying we should split the split thread, but sometimes it is hard to follow who is talking about what

[reibuehl]

This one is for 1. and 2., the thread for 3. is here.

1. and 2. are kind of related since both sensors, the Tunell and the Sparkfun, are detecting end of spool and total jamming while the Sparfun sensor detects a few conditions in the middle too.

[Amedee]

Right

To elaborate a bit, (1) is relatively easy to do, because you just need to check a pin state and take some actions.

(2) is much more complex, because you need to count the sensor pulses, compare to the extruder movement and take a decision based on that -- Repetier is quite nice: it it detects a delta, it starts to print slower, and beyond a threshold it considers a jam and completely stops.