Ramps Cooler/Guard with Status LEDs by Justblair

Last crawled date: 2 years, 11 months ago

I am currently the proud owner of a newborn Reprap Prusa Printer.
I still have some way to go in getting my RepRap performing at it's peak. What I have learned so far is that cooling your printer is important. As well as keeping the thermal barrier cool in the hot end of the printer, the other area of the printer that gets nice and toasty is the electronics.
I tried to passively cool my StepStick stepper motor drivers with some heatsinks, but after a long session printing they were pretty hot. So I designed this.
The Ramps Cooler/Guard is a pretty simple design as you can see, but it is effective and pretty neat.
I also felt that it would be useful to me to gain a little feedback from my printer so I have added three holes to the right hand side of the piece to furnish two red LEDs and a green LED. These quite simply are connected to the power input, heat-bed heater and extruder tip outputs on the RAMPS board. The green LED tells me that there is 12v power to the the printer, the red LEDs come on when my heaters are active.
The mounting holes for a RAMPS shield match of course the Arduino Mega, so there may be other applications for this design. In a future version I may add a power switch, but feel free to add one if you use my design.
IMPORTANT. The mounting holes will need adjusting in the .scad file for your printer/hardware.