How To Add Assisted Bed Leveling to a 3d Printer

hi this serves you pro if the doctor backs Channel and there is one activity that is more important for successful 3d prints than anything else and that activity is the activity of properly leveling and calibrating your 3d printer bed if the 3d printer bed is not leveled and calibrated properly whether you're printing a beautiful vase or a calibration cat they will fail why because they won't stick to the bed and if they come loose during the print you're findt print will not succeed even if they come just slightly loose the quality of your print will suffer now I've done a number of videos about leveling the print bed and in most cases I've shown you how to manually level your print bed that is how to rotate the z-axis how to move the printer head while the printer the 3d printer is turned off now number of people a number of my viewers have pointed out limitations to this procedure the first is some people are concerned that by moving these components with the printer off the stepper motors which are DC motors and act as generators when they're not receiving electrical current will generate back currents that will impact the electronics on the printer I've been doing this for a long time I've never had a printer Control Board failed because of this but it is appropriate to move these components slowly when you're moving them the other concern the viewers have shared is that since the printer is off the stepper motors are not energized that means that the printhead might move while you're trying to calibrate it legitimate concern but in most cases manually using the procedure listed in the videos shown on the top of the screen works fine however I do believe we can always do better so today I've created a g-code file manually coded g-code that will help you in a semi-automated way level your printer bed stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] before I go to the printer and show you the actual procedure I want to explain some of the concepts behind the procedure all 3d printers require code in essence instructions to operate many consumer grade printers use an open-source interpreter called Marlin to interpret the instructions to tell the printer how to move the printhead how to extrude the filament Marlin interprets a language a set of standards called G code now there are other sets of standards for other types of 3d printers today we're going to be talking about g code which is a very large percentage of home based 3d printers g code normally is produced when you take a model and you slice it with a slicer the slicer produces g code what i've done is i've hand coded the g code in order to position the printer printhead at the various locations I'm interested in for leveling the print bed so first it will move it here then I'll move it here then I'll move it here then the G code will move it here it'll move it here in between each of those movements the printer will pause and wait for you to click a button on your printer council now since all printers do not handle all G codes the same way I've included multiple identifiers for when it is time for a user to take in action I tend to put a message on the display that works on some printers as an example that worked on my Prusa I play a little tone that works on the Ender 3 in some cases both work on my Ender 5 which has updated firmware not factory standard firmware both ways work so depending on your printer you will either see a message on the council or here a little set of tones when it's time for you to take an action I'll demonstrate that now before we demonstrate that lets go to my computer screen and look at the g-code I produced on this first screen you'll see that there are some lines starting with a semicolon those are comment lines they will not be interpreted by the printer the first line that is interpreted by the printer is this n17 line and 17 tells the printer to put a message on the counsel on the LCD screen so here is a message saying we're going to start print leveling I then switch the printer with AG 92 absolute mode that means I'm gonna tell you using XYZ coordinates exactly where to go not relative to your last position but exactly where to go next I put a message on the screen again then on the M 140 I set the print bed temperature M 190 I wait for the print bed to come up to temperature another viewer comin about some of my earlier print bed leveling videos was that I hadn't brought the print bed and the extruder up to temperature first since many objects either expand or contracted temperature depending on the nature of the object it is important to obtain and absolutely precisely calibrated bed I do this for both the print bed and for the extruder then I tell the printer to home all the axes I move the G access to 10 millimeters above the print bed so it won't scrape at all when I'm moving it I take an I go to position 44 T which will be approximately here so these calibration numbers are set up for an Ender printer if you have a different sized print bed you could edit this file and I'll provide you links to this file you can edit this file to move to different locations I'm moving to the locations above each of the adjustment knob on the Ender line of printers I then tell the printer to do a g1 Z zero that moves the printhead to the starting position to the zero position that should be above the print bed only offset by a V offset if your printer supports variable Z offsets as an example if your printer has an auto bed leveling system you'll use the Z offset to do the fine calibration the Ender three does not have a nazi offset so this is going to put it to the home position above the print bed I wait a couple seconds to make sure that movement has completed and then I play a tone why do I play a tone well because playing a tone is just one way to notify the user you'll see here I also attempt to put a message on the console and then I do a pause an m0 a pause on some printers the m0 can have a message after it in the case of the stock ender 3 you will see a wait for user message on your display so these messages I've added will not be displayed but to make sure you're aware that that message is going to occur I will play a tone and that is successfully played on the under three line or the stock Enders I then allow time because the printer is paused for you to manually adjust your printer I'll show you that then I just repeat this four more times to go to the other four positions I want to calibrate so that's all there is to it now how did I create the g-code file I went into a text editor a text editor is different than a word processor word processors put extra codes into your file to control regular printers each at laser printers in this case I needed the text to be pure text I used the text editor called Adam here's a screenshot of the Adam website the Adam text editor works on any operating system so it works under windows under Mac and under Linux you can use Notepad applications on various operating systems you just have to make sure they're set to save as text files not as rich text files ok I took and I put this g-code file onto an SD card and then we just load the SD code card into the printer and we can run the procedure let me readjust the camera so you can see this better and we'll show you how the procedure works ok I'm going to take the SD card with the g-code file put it into the printer the anomaly on these printers is on the Ender line of printers the SD cards going upside down I'll go to my front panel I'll select an it SD card which does not zero it out it just makes it available I'll go to print SD card and I'm going to select the g-code file with my code well hear a beep and at this point it says wait for user so I'll press the button one time and now it's going to heat up the print bed the screen will switch back to the info screen in a moment and its first going to heat up the print bed and then it's going to heat up the extruder now depending on your printer you will see notifications to this effect on the front console it says bed heating in this case and that's a message that came from the m117 g-code command so now we need to wait for the bed to heat up and for the extruder to heat up ok now the message changed to indicate it is heating up the extruder and in the case of the Ender 3 the firmware messages sometimes overwrite the messages that I provided once again how the M 117 and M 0 commands are handled varies from printer to printer okay now the printer is going to do a home and then it's going to move to the first calibration position to moving to the first calibration position and you heard that tone that means it's ready for us to calibrate now the printer is still on the print pad has been heated up to 40 degrees now I chose 40 degrees because it's warm enough to impact the calibration but not so hot that it will burn you however the print nozzle is hot so you do need to be careful in the case of an ender 3 it says wait for user on the front panel the technique I've always used is to use a post-it note there are Springs under the bed so we can press down slightly on the bed and then we can see if we can move this slightly underneath well this is a little too tight because I can't move at all so I want to compress the springs I want to pull the bed down to do that I'm going to make turn the knob to the right that's a little bit too much because righty-tighty lefty-loosey now I'm going to loosen it a little bit to let the spring out till we get it just about right then I'm going to press the button here to let it go to the next position you'll notice that it lifted the printhead 10 millimeters up before it moved it in case our bed is really off we want to make sure it doesn't scratch the bed then you heard the tone I can put this underneath same way press on the front bed a little bit a little bit too loose on this one make it a little bit tighter it says wait for user on the front panel once again I'll reach over and press it and it will move to the next position now do I believe that this procedure should be included in the firmware for every printer absolutely I'm not sure why it's not but as you can see it's easy to create we're ready for the next position it's pretty good there go to the final position I misspoke not the final position because I added a check for the center position that's Chester's here pretty good go to the next one and this is the check in the center this is actually perfect on this printer now in some cases there's a problem on some Ender printers where the bed might be bowed slightly a good solution for that is just to put a regular post-it note under the print bed at that location there were some concerns listed by viewers that was the post-it note flammable well paper will not catch fire at a hundred degrees Celsius which is the maximum temperature of this print bed so that's the procedure it's really quite simple now to complete the procedure you press one more time it will move the printhead up a bit so that you can take the bed off if you want to now what I like to do at this point is go and say print from sd card and I have a print here that I will start here is an example that print completed that was done before this is a calibration print and you can see this absolutely perfect because I can't rub any of these lines off yet they're very dark I like printing these calibration prints in white filament I find it's much much easier to see okay let's zoom back up and wrap up our discussion well folks I did go through the actual bed leveling procedure rather quickly once again there are links to a number of videos about leveling your printer bed which you'll find helpful what is most important though is the concept here we were able to create a file using G code that added a basic feature assisted bed leveling to our printer this will work with any Marlin based printer that uses G code and potentially with other printers that support either G code or where you can manually create a file of instructions so folks I hope you learned something today I hope this was useful please can you delete comment its your comments about moving the stepper motors without power and about heating the bed that led to this additional video with another technique you can use for leveling and properly calibrating your printer thanks so much for watching give me a thumbs up if you like this video share with everyone you know leave comments and most important let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 26,367

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Id: zfTm0SqIFm4

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019