Does astroprint support smart plug emergency shutdown?

AstroBox
#1

I had a small fire today after experiencing thermal runaway on a heat bed. It seems that more modern firmware on my old printers might have shut down the printer before it got out of hand. I’m told that Octoprint has a feature where it can link to a wemo smart plug and trigger a shut down under certain circumstances. Does astroprint offer anything like this?

#2

Octoprint likely does this via a 3rd party plugin. We don’t yet have a plugin system

#3

I use SmartThings in my home and here’s how I set up a rule for this outside of any printing platform:

  1. I plug the printer into a smart plug
  2. Installed a smoke detector above the printer on the ceiling
  3. Created a rule in SmartThings that if smoke it detected to turn off the plug. I already use the smart home features to alert me and set of panic alarms when smoke it detected so I’ll be notified all over the house if there’s smoke somewhere.
  4. Mounted a fire extinguisher just outside the door so I can grab it off the wall on the way into the room if needed.

I also have Octoprint for my printer and use a SmartPlug plug-in that integrates with the Kasa smart plug so when the job is finished and the hot end cools down to 40ºC to turn off the plug and it works like a charm!

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#4

Hey John, I tried to do something similar but failed. What smoke alarm do you have? I got the Nest Protect but seems like at the moment there are essentially no smart features available through the google home app.

#5

I use the First Alert Smoke/CO detectors with Samsung SmartThings.

#6

Damn a hell of a lot cheaper than my non helpful Nest. Maybe ill send this one back. Thanks for the reco!

#7

First of all, i’m sorry you had this problem, i have been trying to mitigate all possible catastrophic failures and its quite scary how bad things can go really fast.

Anyway, about the thermal runaway feature (as you probably know) its just a software protection in some firmwares that can detect if there is a termistor malfunction or decoupling and trigger a fault condition in the board (as arduino or something else). it is far from perfect and can fail. My suggestion is to add a 5amp 300-350C (depending on your extruder limit) in series with the heater (and coupled to the heater block) to completely cut power to the nozzle if everything else goes wrong (as a mosfet failure, MCU failure or board short), this is the safest option we found here as discussing this with dozens of people, of which three had their printers on fire.

The fire extinguisher is also really recommended (preferably those grenade types (sorry but i’m not sure it translates right), which will blow up if there is a fire and automatically put it out)

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