Beacon ABL bed scanner - Amazing speed and accuracy, perfect 1st layers

and probe that produces a higher resolution mesh but in much less time sounds amazing right introducing the beacon [Music] [Music] Auto bit leveling is found on most new 3D printers these days or if not is often added as an upgrade most of the available abl prob probes are plenty high in their accuracy as I found out in this shootout video with so many good probes already on the market you would need something really Innovative to stand out with a new product and in my opinion that's just what Beacon is Beacon is a new abl probe or should I say surface scanner and it is unique in its operation all of the abl probes that I've used travel down vertically Towards the bed stopping when triggered by the bed to measure the height at that point and win a series of these points is measured in a grid over the entire surface of the bed we can build up a 3D mesh representing the bed and then the firmware will allow the nozzle to ride these Contours to produce a perfect first layer even on a bed that's not level or flat but for Beacon as we can see from this graphic there's no moving up or down it simply sweeps over the surface and that allows it to have great speed it boasts incredible resolution taking 1 000 samples per second and it can handle up to 110 degrees ambient which will suit pretty much any 3D printer just not those with really hot enclosed Chambers the key to this is that Beacon uses Eddy currents and personally I have pretty much zero knowledge of Eddy currents so if you're like me I've linked an entertaining Electro Boom video in the description for you to go and learn the net result of this approach is that a beacon abl probe sweeping over the bed is very fast and produces very high resolution so if you're someone who likes abl but doesn't want to wait for the entire bed to probe before every print then Beacon might just be for you there is of course the cost which is US 80 I pre-ordered mine and got it slightly cheaper than this but then again postage to Australia was expensive Beacon won't run on every 3D printer so let's quickly examine the prerequisites the first of these is that we need Clipper firmware not only for Clipper's tremendous processing speed but also because Beacon doesn't plug into the main board but rather a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi it has its own MCU and is connected as such Beacon needs a conductive bed IE metal without large magnets your typical spring steel removable sheet is absolutely perfect for this as is the magnet underneath however printer beds such as that on The Pusher Mark III with large inbuilt magnets are not recommended and may not work the beacon sensor is light but it does take up more room than the average probe and therefore you need room on your tool head most abl prob probes are tall and skinny whereas Beacon is wide and low furthermore it must be mounted with the keepout Zone above it respected and in this volume we shouldn't have metal objects or we can throw off the readings so make sure your target printer has a suitable Zone where you can place the beacon to avoid disappointment finally and this one did catch me out an 8-bit main board in your copy installation is not advised I went through all of the trouble of Designing a perfect custom Mount editing the firmware and completing the calibration but every time I tried to home the machine I got a communication timeout error after some generous help on the Discord it was proposed that the 8-Bit main board that I was still running on my cr-10 Max couldn't keep up so I went through the whole process again on the second SK tank and this time it worked perfectly it's not the Beacon's fault just more of the high demands of multi MCU homing on Clipper and that's why in this video you'll see footage on two different printers even though the installation was only successful on one of them onto unboxing and Beacon comes in this nice little plastic case inside we have some mounting hardware a six foot long braided USB cable to connect Beacon to your Pi or other SBC some cable tires to help with cable management and of course the actual Beacon abl sensor out of Interest I compared the weight to a BL touch which came in at seven grams with the beacon being approximately half rounding up to 4 grams on my scales let's work our way through installation starting with the docks linked from the main website is this documentation page as well as technical support through Discord we have a series of pages to assist us in installing the beacon for the most part what's on the quick start page is perfectly sufficient especially if you've previously installed Clipper and understand the structure of the firmware however other Pages have more detailed information such as guidelines for designing a mount and a complete set of commands that work with Clipper and the complete set of parameters available for your configuration so onto designing a mount and there are some pre-made for engineering printers VZ bot as well as voron and for any other printer you can easily create your own by using either these diagrams or scrolling up and downloading a cad model my aim was to position the beacon where the current BL touch was sitting there was already threaded mounting holes available and I figured there was just room to the side of the duct I imported the beacon CAD with the red keep out Zone on Top This is where we need to avoid having metal components and the green disc on the bottom is where the bed should sit of course we can hide or show any of these components for clarity my first version of amount was pretty simple and basic but it was enough to allow me to verify the whole spacing of the beacon as well as get a rough idea of where the beacon would sit on the machine it's important to check all aspects such as sufficient clearance for X homing clearance around existing pipe cooling ducts and the sensor Hyatt relative to the tip of the nozzle I iterated my amount version after version each time changing things a millimeter or so and testing it on the machine to try and get the sensor into the correct position without failing the existing parts this was my final iteration had sufficient clearance holes for cable tires and a lot of Lightning by adding chamfers the sensor sat just clear of the part cooling duct and the vertical offset versus the tip of the nozzle was just under three millimeters which was ideal when you are finished designing your duct you need to measure from the center of the logo to the tip of the nozzle to determine your X and Y offsets the same as any other abl probe when designing a second mount for the second SK tank I actually had more of a model to work around and this meant I got the design right on the first attempt you'll notice that there is some geometry intersecting with the keepout Zone but there's no metal Parts here and as such it hasn't affected functionality and here's the beacon bolted into position ready for me to proceed with wiring 1.8 meters or 6 feet is plenty long for the major already of 3D printers however the cr-10 max is truly enormous and to match the length of the existing cables back to the pi and main board I would need to extend the SK tank was also tricky for me as I mount the pie at the front underneath the touchscreen that means the cable would need to go over the back around the edges of the frame and back to the pie and therefore the cable wasn't long enough the solution for printers like this is to use a USB extension cable after doing a quick test to make sure this would work I run the original supplied cable at the back of the print head with a little strain relief printed piece and then join this up with the USB extender cable until they met at the back of the machine just be aware that the original cable has been tested for flex and movement whereas any extension cables you use have not that's why my extension cable will be remaining static we're up to Firmware and calibration which I found straightforward to proceed we're going to need to log into the pi with SSH you should know how to do this from installing Clipper but if you don't I have a video guide linked below here I'm working from the quick start page and now we just copy and paste the commands to install the required software it did say it could take up to 10 minutes for this first section but I found it was over in a matter of seconds the next parts of the configuration we do from our Clipper web interface in my case being Mainsail we're going to copy and paste the configuration code from the docs page inserting it into the moonraker.com file the false saving and restarting our next changes will occur in the printer.cfg file we're going to copy the beacon section and then paste it into the printer config and I chose to do this in the same section as the previous BL touch config each Beacon module will have a different serial id address so we need to come back to SSH list the serial devices by ID you will have at least two returned the first being the main board that you're running Clipper on but we're looking for the one with beacon in the name and we're going to highlight and copy this string paste it into our configuration file and delete the placeholder text that was already there our only other change in this section is to modify the offsets we measured earlier entering them for X and Y if you are already running an abl probe build touch or otherwise you'll need to comment out these sections as they will conflict with Beacon you could delete them if you want but I prefer to keep it until I knew everything was working which ended up being important if you don't have it already you need to add a safe Zone position with a z hop value of 3. I already had this section so I simply updated the Z hop value to 3. the final change is in your stepper Z section I already had the Z virtual end stop command so all I had to do was insert the home in the retract distance leaving it at the zero value required that's all of the firmware changes done so we can now save the config to restart Clipper time to calibrate and I'm continuing from the quick start guide here the first thing we do is home X and Y and then we manually move the print head to the center of the bed it doesn't need to be the exact center for instance on the cr-10 max I use the same coordinates that I do for safes at homing we then send the command Beacon calibrate this is like regular probe calibrate and we use the -1 arrows to move the print head down to get the nozzle closer to the bed once it's just above we put a piece of paper in place and use finer increments to move down until the piece of paper is just pinched by the nozzle you might also notice that once you get this close a red LED will be illuminated on the side of the beacon once you've found the right value you can click the accept button and then enter save config which will store the calibration data the recommendation now is to heat up the bed to your regular printing temperature and once everything is stable to run the calibration sequence again except this time the calibration value should be more accurate because the bed is at operating temperature once again we accept the value save our config and once Clipper reloads we should be able to see the calibration data at the bottom of our printer.cfg file if everything's gone well you should now be able to home the printer and the beacon will be used for the z-axis end stop if you run Z tilt you can use the beacon just like any other probe to correct the positioning of the bed and since you've changed the mass of the printhead just a reminder that if you're running input shaping you'll need to recalibrate that as well finally let's try some actual abl probing and play with the settings he's the result of me running bed mesh calibrate for the first time using the default settings my existing printer configuration was already set for a 7x7 mesh with an XY speed of 150 millimeters per second in terms of the beacon waiting the default mesh runs value of two that means that when the first pass is done it goes back in Reverse over the same path taking a second set of measurements with these values it took about 35 seconds to complete the mesh and here's what was measured firstly the raw values and then interpolated next I headed into the printer configuration to increase the resolution this scan was for an 11 by 11 mesh at the same 150 millimeters per second speed still two mesh runs and for all of this detail we have the outstanding time of 54 seconds I forgot to do Z tilt first so this looks quite skewed but there are many raw data points and it becomes even better with resolution once we interpolate this time let's tweak for Speed instead of accuracy this scan is back to 7x7 but at 200 millimeters per second and only a single mesh run this is the same resolution I to probe with but it's over in only 11 seconds the best part is to me the data looks just as good as it ever did despite the fast speed so I prepared a quick real world print test adding a bed scan into my start g code where previously I only did Z tilt the bed headed up the scan took place again in only 11 seconds and as the initial skirt went down I prepared to adjust the Z offset which is still adjusted just like any other abl probe but I only needed to adjust the first layer by .05 millimeters I'll probably fine tune the offset a little more but already this is a fantastic first layer with the X being even the whole way over the bed and it only took 11 seconds to scan Beacon like any upgrade will not be for everyone some will think it's too expensive or perhaps they won't want to design a custom Mount whereas others might want Cutting Edge and the speed and efficiency that it offers personally I feel it's an interesting step in a positive direction let me know what you think about beacon in the comments section thank you so much for watching and until next time happy Cutting Edge 3D printing g'day it's Michael again if you like the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the Bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time foreign

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 114,806

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d print, 3d printed, klipper, beacon, abl, auto bed levelling, auto bed leveling, probe, scanner, mesh, bed scanner, test, review, guide, how to, fast, accurate, accuracy, resolution, calinration, unboxing, cable, cabling, wiring, pi, setup, firmware, macro, first layer, step by step, mainsail, offset, model, mount, cad, custom, design

Id: YkH-vVaBYtQ

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023