Idea, spool with weight indicator so you don’t need to take it out and weight it. Of course its not 100% accurate but good enough whether you have enough to print or notm
If you could 3d print a spindle with a void to insert a mini weight sensor at the apex of the spindle to be wired to a digital readout…
Sell stickers
The filament of the Dutch webshop http://123-3d.nl has such an indicator, but for length instead of weight.
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Too bad it will be difficult to get the spool’s empty weight and have it not change from spool to spool. Oh well. At least it should give you a rough guess that can be adjusted with the before and after weights for a print. Moisture may affect the readings slightly too.
Come to think of it, by gathering multiple before and after readings, you may be able to tell if it picked up moisture.
@NathanielStenzel like I mentioned before if you incorporate a sensor into the spindle, you can tare the weight of an empty spool!!!
I would love to see all filament manufacturers list total length in addition to weight. Then, if you wanted, you could weigh a meter of new filament and estimate the spool weight. Length is also a better measurement for printing since slicers know how far they’re driving extruders.
@Fook_INGSOC after you have the empty spool and if the company changes empty spool weights, you will have different readings than you figured you would for the amount of filament left.
@Tim_Visible …and if they molded the weight of spool right into the spool itself there would be no guessing! You could just subtract it from the total!!!
^^^ Also a good suggestion.
Given the weight and the gravity(density?) of the filament you could simply convert the amount of filament into meters, assuming you know the raw filament weight without spool. Coupled with a sensor (amount of fed filament = revolutions of the sensor) you could monitor your filament easily. Maybe an additional arduino nano with the required setup sending beeps, if you run out of filament. Data could be stored on an SD card. Another problem to solve would be to know which spool you are monitoring.
I try to measure the weight before using and write it on the side. It’s not a sure thing but much closer than reading markings on the side of a spool. Also, about a gram of moisture can make a spool of plastic go from fine to terrible. Keeping old spools around is sometimes helpful for reference tares. That isn’t always a sure thing because the same spools are often molded in different kinds of plastics, and they are rarely identified, but sometimes the differences in shine and texture are cues.
It wörks accurate enough.