My Shapeoko is ancient (2015, and I just finished putting it together) and came with a simple bent alu cover that leaves the top and bottom wide open. aka zero dust protection. I am planning to design&print a housing that is basically dust-proof, which means little to no airflow to the PCB. I know the PCB is using the gantry as a giant heatsink, so I am not totally concerned where the heat is going, but having close to zero airflow over the PCB, is it going to work, or do i need to design in some venting?
If anything, I could include a tiny fan sucking air/heat out, using whatever space around the cable/USB/Power as inlets. (all cables exit out the top).
The original design included a fan, but that turned out to be superfluous.
The sheet metal enclosures are pretty closed up, so airflow shouldn’t be an issue — the stepper driver chips are positioned on the board so that the thermal load is shed off the bottom.
My thoughts were that I needed to protect the board from flying chips (when cutting metal), but that dust should be taken care of by the dust collection anyway.
I upgraded to the BitRunner and got a new cover assembly. The instructions were not explicit at the time but you needed to remove the large alum hit sink and replace it with a considerably smaller heat sink attached to the board and extrusion with thermal tape.
So either the original heat sink was over engineered or the newest versions are undersized. Since the newer setup is drastically smaller than the original I have to trust that Carbide3d knows what is required. So fans and other thermal options are not needed. Hopefully.
