motivation:
Thankfully to Thomas Salanderer that put a big amount of work in the very informative video “3D printers are worse than I thought. Time to do something about it!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nofn_MHrxrs) we all learned that in the end the most important parameter for the overall air quality of FDM-printers are the amount of PM 2,5 particles in the air. And we also learned that the HEPA-filter and active carbon filter in the units like the BentoBox or Nevermore filters helps out to clean the air by circulating the air inside the chamber through the filter units, too. Like you can see in the video of Lost in Tech’s video “Your 3D Printer Stinks.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxMUj7pcPPI)
For my understanding after every print the people are let the filter do its thing for a couple of minutes and “hope” more or the less by “guessing” that the air is cleaned out enough. But you don’t know if this is successful cleaned out. And you even don’t know if the active carbon is already exhausted.
So here is my idea:
Adding support of the PMSA003 Sensor from Plantower (https://thepihut.com/products/pms5003-particulate-matter-sensor-with-cable) in klipper to get an quantitative indicator of the chamber/ambient air quality. And in addition to that you get an indicator of the condition of the active carbon because if the stuff is saturated, the time of the air cleaning process increases or in the end you don’t get the PM2,5 concentrate down anymore.
Imagine after every print you let the fans of your filtration system circulating the air to clean it out and get an instant response of the air condition in the printer chamber. Either through exact data of the sensor is reading that is plot in the mainsail front-end in the temperature diagram (i don’t if this is possible easily, because of the need of adding an other scale on the right side of the diagram nearby the PWM scale) or illustrating in form of something like an traffic light signal that gives you an easy visualize feedback of the air quality.
The sensor comes with an UART serial interface that could be connect through the GPIO pins of the raspi that for my undertstanding must be added as an secondary mcu.
For (easy?) data access the sensor offers a python libery, too.
So what do you think?
Could this a good addition to the existing filtration systems like the BentoBox or Nevermore?