Has anyone seen this new Creality product called the Digital Spool Rack-S?
What are your thoughts on this?
Interesting - I’d like to know more about it and two questions come out right from the start (they’re not answered by the web page):
- How does it manage the tare weight (empty spool weight)? It’s somewhat useless unless I can get the actual filament remaining weight.
- How does it mount to a printer? It looks like there are a couple/three 3mm holes for attaching to V-Slot but I’d like to understand it better.
2 It looks like its a drop in replacement or add on for the ender 3. So either it just used the existing bracket, or supplies one. Most likley attaching to the printer with t-nuts.
1 too am curious how it figures this out. Also could the data be implemented into the printer?
As the others said, the ad seems to imply some way to use tare weight when they say “accurately weighing and showing remaining filament weight” this isn’t useful without being able to input tare.
The concern I have about this is that the unit will only be accurate when buying Creality branded filament with a specific spool.
The unit cost of the “Spool Rack-S” doesn’t look bad, but is it a vehicle for keeping Creality customers in house for all their 3D purchases?
It can’t be any good, it’s not the “3D Digital Spool Rack-S PRO” (tongue in cheek).
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Some manufacturers lists empty weights some don’t.
This is an interesting product. If you had ok empty weights it would be very useful. I could stop putting filaments on my lab scale!
wife says… I’ll bet you are the only one that does that… now I have proof
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@Glenn WHAT!!! you do not have a lab scale in your house? What ever do you measure your chemicals with? that sounds bad. I make platinum prints and measure out the chemicals needed…
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hehe no I just have a small mail room scale but I have a system of wall-mounted storage with labels to mark filament info on like remaining weight. I wanted to use dry erase markers (they permanently mark plastics usually) so while wifey was yard sale and thrift store hunting I found an old aluminum window blind (harder to find than you think) that I cut up for writing surfaces on printed label holders… totally overdone but drew the attention of some people … ire you might say …
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LOL I just grease pencils on the side of a plastic milk carton…
Kitchen scale purchased at Dollarama.
Sharpie or paint pen (depending on the spool type and colour) to record original weight on the spool and estimate remaining based on the assumption that the original filament weight will be -10% of the stated weight.
Simple system, never have run out of filament on a print.
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also … I’m working on a… I guess a welder… to weld the end on one filament to the end of another I have the clamp made already just have to experiment with heat time to decide if the actual heating and clamping need to be accurate. the only issue I have is the bit roll that’s too small to use because most of my parts are big and there too much filament to just discard. Since I mostly use the same colours or same materials over and over I could just join and rewind it back onto the next new spool.
Something like this?
I would think that you’d want to try to keep to the same manufacturer and ideally the same lot code.
Keep us up to date as to how you’re doing!
More like this, in the photo. Its similar to a tool I use for joining poly belt. This doesn’t have a welder of course and you’d have to clean the joint if you get the timing and pressure wrong. There is one for poly belt that’s similar to the one in your link but I found them unreliable because the time and pressure for that is very finicky or the joint will fail quickly. This part is just the clamp and If I can just melt and press then thats great but if I need a timer the. I can make those parts to fit this clamp.
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Looping back to the original post: it looks like it would be generally useful. Even if one didn’t have an empty spool weight, it would mean I could do things like:
-See the starting mass
-See how much was used after my print
-Compare the actual delta-m with the estimate from my slicer
-adjust the filament profile and/or my in-use notes to have a closer estimate of plastic remaining.
It obviously wont be perfect. My Ender-5 spool is mounted on a little extension arm I made from some extra extrusion and that’s not a perfect fit so there’s some play in it, which would screw up the scale. And it wouldn’t be capturing the mass of the plastic in the feed path, though of course that’s not a large number. It it could certainly be useful, though. Leaving only the question of: how much does it cost? This is certainly 20$ worth of useful. It’s not 100$ worth of useful.
It may be set up to assume a new spool with 1 KG on it and then just subtract the difference in weight and give the results. May or may not be accurate depending on the original amount of filament but the spool weight would be redundant . If you change the spool to a partially used one then it all goes to hell.
Accuracy is not likely. It is costly for accuracy. It really only needs to be constant.
Accuracy is cheap
Repeatability and a user interface costs.