Filament Jam Sensor

The Dirt Cheap Filament Jam Sensor is an ADNS9800-based device which installs like a filament filter and monitors the motion of filament through itself during printing. The device can be configured to provide information like consumed filament and detected jams over Wi-Fi to a remote host, such as a Home Assistant instance, as well as be physically connected to a 3D printers filament runout sensor circuit.

The design motivation behind this device was a discovered difficulty in directly observing extruders to detect jams or grinds as opposed to a break or runout. Most extruders do not expose a view of the gears in a manner which can be easily observed in an affordable way. Rather than trying to figure out how to train some model and use some camera to detect this, I decided using something simple like a computer mouse would work way better.

This idea has been successfully tested with some COTS boards. ADNS9800 breakouts are pretty easy to acquire, and other than that you really only need a microcontroller. ESP32s make this very easy, so if you want to skip waiting and buying this from me, making your own should not be too bad!

Overview

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