An Instrumented FDM Extruder

This one’s a bit odd, in that it is more heavily instrumented than most FDM extruders: there’s a load cell in the filament path, so we can measure a pressure analog in the nozzle. The load cell also works as a touch probe, as a bonus.

There’s a filament feed sensor as well, which measured real filament diameter & linear feed rate. I am actively working on controllers that listen to all of this data and optimize flow rates in realtime, first paper is coming out shortly.

Get the NIST Extruder as an .f3z
Get the NIST Extruder as a .step