Work is progressing nicely on my coffee table heated enclosure for my Mendel 90 / CAD station. I plan to use octoprint on a Raspberry Pi to control the prints and an RGB LED string to indicate print status, and an Arduino w/ display and the necessary circuitry & hardware to control the environment temperature (and maybe a post print, servo-driven build platform clearing mechanism.) After some research, 70C (158F) seems like the target ideal temp for a build area - but this is quite hot! I could reach this temperature, but it seems the stepper motors might need some cooling? I have some old watercooling hardware - so I guess my question is:
At what ambient temperature does active cooling of the stepper motors become a good idea?
And is attaching a heatsink (watercooled) to any side of the motor acceptable? I have a good background in heat transfer, but am not sure how the internals of the stepper are arranged. (location of coils that are producing the heat relative to the metal structure of the motor.)
I may consider eventually monitoring the temperature of each of the steppers and displaying them (and ambient) on a small display / enabling an audible alarm at critical high temp.
As the build starts to look more impressive I’ll post some pictures