All Aluminum High Temp Bed

[draw-tech]

I am in process of building a solid aluminum bed, for higher temps and more controlled surface temperature, I will supply power from an external supply, to handle the current. It will have two sets of the standard heaters (8) per set and two thermistors. Does anybody have a procedure to connect the second heater loop in the rambo/Ardino? I,m not even sure it can be done.
Draw-Tech

[bvandiepenbos]

I think you could control it with a SSR
Why two thermistors?

[Qdeathstar]

Maybe for the edge vs the center?

[teoman]

If you do not use dual extrusion you could use the second thermistor slot for.

But why use heating elements?

Get a 110 or 220v silicone heating pad and stick it under the aluminium bit. Some even have a thermistor built in.




Random example
http://m.aliexpress.com/item-desc/32424688342.html

This one is 59 cm in diameter. Has a thermistor and is 1500w operated directly from the mains. An ac ssr could drive it easilt.

[Polygonhell]

I assume he is trying to have dual heating zones, I believe E3D have been doing this with the big box printer. It eats you have more consistent temperature across the bed, especially if the bed is large.
I don't know of any firmware out of the box that supports this, it probably wouldn't be very hard to add.
As I mentioned I believe E3D have been doing something similar, it might be worth pinging them and see what they are doing for firmware.

[Jimustanguitar]

My new build uses one of the 6lb slabs of Mic6 aluminum from Sands Machine and a trio of 175W silicone heater pads. I've got some PID tuning to do (which is a 100% manual process on the DUET board), but after that I'll have a nice thing going.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/nDCE6Xk.jpg?1[/img]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/o44aqan.jpg[/img]

[bvandiepenbos]

Nice Jim.
To bad it takes a couple 6 packs of cold ones to cool it down in a reasonable amount of time.