Marlin: Support For Dual Zone Heatbeds

Created on 21 Jun 2016 · 19Comments · Source: MarlinFirmware/Marlin

Hi there,

I'm working with a new Dual Zone Heatbed, it can be controlled via the RAMPS, however i want to be able to read each Zone's Temp independently, is it a huge task to add Support for another Heatbed ##Therm input? I was going to just register it as another Hotend, but ideally want it to be displayed as a second heatbed on the Full Graphics LCD.

Thanks

Alex

Feature Request

Source

AlexDoran

👍1

Most helpful comment

Notes:

Will need to add to Configuration.h…

#define TEMP_SENSOR_BED2 0

For pins_THEBOARD.h we will need…

#define TEMP_BED2_PIN nn
#define HEATER_BED2_PIN nn

Other bed-specific parameters will apply to both beds.

thinkyhead on 22 Jun 2016

👍3

All 19 comments

I second this request. Would be great to be able to control the second zone with appropriate G/M codes and have seperate independent temperature control via the LCD as well.

crncrussell on 21 Jun 2016

👍1

Notes:

Will need to add to Configuration.h…

#define TEMP_SENSOR_BED2 0

For pins_THEBOARD.h we will need…

#define TEMP_BED2_PIN nn
#define HEATER_BED2_PIN nn

Other bed-specific parameters will apply to both beds.

thinkyhead on 22 Jun 2016

👍3

Sounds Promising!

After having thought about this some more last night:

Currently the bed is triggered using one of the AUX pins, I am 100% certain that the Outer Zone is going to take longer to heat than the Inner Zone, however currently i am only reading temp and heating based on the Inner Zone. I believe this will likely cause the heater to warp.

As a more long term solution if another RAMPS 1.4 board could be selected to support the following:

2 Extruder Outputs (PWM Output)
1 Cooling Fan Output (PWM Output)
2 Heatbeds or Heatbed Zones (AUX Output)

I believe that would be extremely useful, more and more printers are releasing with Dual Zone Heatbeds.

Thanks Again

Alex

AlexDoran on 22 Jun 2016

Thinkyhead, is this something you think can make it into the 1.1.x/RC7, or are we looking down the road a bit on the roadmap?

crncrussell on 22 Jun 2016

My vote is we should focus on just bug fixes for existing features right now. If we do that, we should be able to get the current code very solid and promote it to the 'Stable Release' in 3 or 4 weeks. At that point, we can clone the Stable Release and create as many Development branches as makes sense. This can be one of the Development branches.

The important thing is we need some rock solid branch for people that don't want new features and mostly need stability.

I would urge you to do this work off of the existing RC-6 RCBugFix branch and try to stay in sync with it. That will make it easier to create a Development Branch as soon as we go 'Golden'.

Roxy-3D on 22 Jun 2016

I can assure you that I 100% have no idea how to implement this myself LOL.

Thanks Again

Alex

AlexDoran on 22 Jun 2016

OK... Well, it really isn't that hard to implement. Most of the logic is already in place to support this. It isn't much different than supporting an extra hotend. But a lot of stuff has to be tweaked to make this fully supported. These kind of changes really should be done in a Development Branch and not one that we are trying to Stabilize.

Roxy-3D on 22 Jun 2016

The questions are..
Why a dual bed hot zone is needed ?
How many Marlin users require this feature ?

jbrazio on 11 Jul 2016

👍1

Closing due to inactivity.
Please re-open this issue if still valid.

jbrazio on 16 Jul 2016

Is there any update on this issue? It would be great to have this on big printers! Or the ability to have PID control for one extruder and bang-bang control for the second extruder.

dragondgold on 20 Nov 2017

@dragondgold This feature is definitely on our TODO list. It just needs a good specification, and then it will be a minor pile of work. It would need to be integrated into various temperature-related G-codes, the PWM / PID bed heater functions, the LCD info screen, and the appropriate LCD menus. Marlin is pretty well hardcoded right now for a single bed heater with a single bed temperature sensor.

thinkyhead on 27 Nov 2017

👎1

Still looking for a way to control 2 heatbed zones for large printbeds without the use of a separate controler

jlipavsky on 28 Dec 2017

I'm also interested on this feature, but to control the heater for the chamber,or any other slow temperature/heater device in the printer. I take a look to implement these by myself ,Marlin reference to extruders with posive numbers and all negative numbers ( <0 ) reference to the bed, only one bed. But it ever use -1 as parameter when call the temperature functions, So we need to adjust these first.