I have 3D printer with a cooling fan that by design is on constantly, however it only needs to be on when there is something to cool! I have no idea why they have it on all the time since it is loud and wastes power... So I need to build a circuit that can detect when the heating element is turned on, and then turn on the fan, and turn it back off when the heat is off. I will probably use a PIC for the brains of the circuit (since I want to have a countdown timer and some other functionality) but I am not sure the most efficient way to hook up to the heating element. It is a 24V, 40W heating element with a simple 2 wire lead. I dont want to worry about hooking into the thermocouple, it should just monitor the binary state of either on or off (ideally with a 3-5 VDC output that can hook directly to one of the pins of the microcontroller)
Any thoughts on the best way to accomplish this?
Thank you very much
Any thoughts on the best way to accomplish this?
Thank you very much