Blog ·
On the bench now: the second stand
The first stand proved that the idea works. The second one is about making it something you would actually leave on a shelf.
A smaller board
The station now also builds for the Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C6, a thumb-sized board with Wi-Fi 6. The pins for the reader, the HX711, a button and an LED are chosen so that none of them is a strapping pin and the serial console stays free. The firmware still builds for the classic ESP32, the ESP32-C3, the ESP32-S3 and the ESP32-C6; the XIAO is just the default for the C6.
A zero button and a zero LED
Zeroing the scale from the phone works, but a button on the station is faster. The button zeroes the scale only when that is safe: calibrated, stable and empty. With a spool on the scale, a press does nothing, so a curious finger cannot shift every later measurement.
The LED tells you whether the scale is ready without opening the web interface: steady on when the scale is zeroed and ready, blinking otherwise.
A printed enclosure
Version 2 of the enclosure is on the printer: about 350 g of PLA and six and a half hours per unit, roughly half of it infill. It is the first step from a desk full of wires to a device.
Still open
- Weight updates and writing the remaining weight back to the TigerTag on the new stand.
- Time sync and the XIAO pins, button and LED on real hardware.
- A review of every error case: what the station shows when Spoolman, the network or a tag fails halfway through an operation.
A question for you
Which tags are on your spools: Bambu Lab, TigerTag, OpenTag3D, Prusa’s OpenPrintTag, or none? Tell us in the Discussions: it decides which reader the next version needs.
Questions or ideas? Join the discussion on GitHub. Get updates by e-mail.