Take Control of Your 3D Printer’s Enclosure with the Open Source Chamber Master

That box that surrounds your 3D printer is actually really important. The enclosure does a lot of things, like preventing warping by keeping the ambient temperature stable and shielding the print from air drafts. A literal cardboard box around the printer would help all on its own, but active control makes an enclosure much more robust. To get that, you can build the open source Chamber Master.

Chamber Master is an open source, ESP32-based 3D printer enclosure controller. It monitors temperature at various points and attempts to regulate the ambient temperature to suit the filament material you’re printing.

This isn’t intended to work with active heating elements, so the only sources of heat in the enclosure will be the heated bed and the hot end. But those put out quite a lot of heat and can raise the enclosure temperature enough for popular materials, like ASA and ABS. Conversely, some materials, like PLA, print best at lower ambient temperatures and so Chamber Master can cool the enclosure, too.

Chamber Master regulates enclosure temperature by blowing air in with a PC fan. A servo-actuated aperture opening can open or close as necessary to achieve the proper airflow. That happens under the control of an ESP32, which measures temperature in three different locations: outside the enclosure, inside the enclosure, and at the air intake.

Users can view those temperatures on Chamber Master’s OLED screen and set the desired temperature with the knob. There is also a web dashboard for remote monitoring. Particular focus was put into the programming that keeps the temperature stable, so there shouldn’t be any odd artifacts one might see as a result of temperature oscillations.

Many newer printers already have this kind of functionality built in. But if you have an older printer or one you built yourself, this could be a good option for enclosure temperature regulation.