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.