Level Up! Install Creality's BLTouch Bed Leveling Kit on Ender-3 V2!

hello 3d printing friends today on the bv3d channel we'll learn how to install creality's bl touch bed leveling kit on the ender 3 v2 3d printer stick around and we'll get into it right after this i'm brian and you are watching bv 3d hi welcome back hey if you're new here and you're wanting to learn about 3d printing 3d modeling and other 3d printing related stuff start now by subscribing and clicking the bell so you don't miss anything okay so today we're going to find out how to install creality's bltouch bed probe kit on the ender3v2 and thanks to creality for sending this to me to try out this kit actually works on several creality printers if they have the v422 or the v427 main board installed these are 32-bit main boards with a 5-pin connector specifically for installing the bl touch here these are the printers the instructions say the kit works with the ender 3 series the ender 5 5s or 5 pro the cr-10 and the ender 6 with no rack and no i have no idea what that means now not every printer list it actually shipped with the 422 or 427 board more recent ender 3 series printers have them but older ones don't and for those printers the boards are offered as user installable upgrades so it'll be necessary to remove the cover of the electronics enclosure to verify the board you've got before you order this specific kit so what is this bl touch thing anyway well it's a bed leveling probe that touches the bed to sense where the surface of it is the firmware in the printer probes the bed at nine points in a three by three grid and uses this information to know if the bed is higher or lower at certain points it contains a magnetically deployed pin and when it's time to probe the bed the pin extends from the body of the probe as the pin contacts the bed it's pressed upward into the probe and at a certain point a magnet captures it and pulls it quickly back into the probe's body and the probe is triggered this differs from inductive bed probes which sense the metal underlying the print surface but the metal and the actual print surface don't always match up for instance you might print on a glass surface well inductive probes see right through that if the glass is flat but the metal print bed dips down a little bit in the center the printer will think that the glass has a dip in the center too now in practice inductive bed leveling generally works great and it doesn't have any moving parts that could break but if you change print surfaces often and there are different thicknesses you have to adjust the z offset on your printer to accommodate that some printers let you store different values that you can select from to make that easier with a touch-based bed probe it always senses the actual print surface so you can change print surfaces and the printer always detects the actual surface that it's going to print on now the drawback to a touch probe is that the probe tip is a moving part and moving parts can break so here's what comes in the kit you get the bltouch probe the connection cable which connects the probe to the printer's main board without the need for an adapter you get three different brackets and the one that you use depends on which printer you're installing this on you get screws to mount the probe to the bracket and the bracket to the printer you get zip ties to secure the cable to the outside of the cable bundle that goes from the main board to the printhead and you get a spare probe tip now that you know what's in the kit let's see what's involved in installing this on the ender3v2 i'll go over this in detail but the basic steps are update the printer's firmware mount the probe and connect the cable coincidentally i recently released a video covering the firmware update process so you can either jump to that right over here or finish watching this video and then use the link in the description to go over to that video now since i'm doing this on my ender 3v2 and from the previous video i know that this printer has realities four two two board installed the firmware file that i need to download is this one which is the one for the ender 3v2 with a 422 board and a bl touch kit without an adapter so i'm going to kind of blast through the firmware update process here and again the detailed firmware update is in a video linked in the description i'll take that dot bin firmware file that i downloaded and copy it to a blank micro sd card put that in the printer and turn the printer on the printer sees the firmware file on the card and updates itself when it's done i'll turn the printer off and unplug it so that takes care of step one next i need to plug the probe side of the cable into the bl touch now this is the smaller of the two connectors on the cable it plugs in here it's keyed so it should only go in one way this has to be done now because it'll be difficult to get to the probes connector once it's mounted on the printer then with the cable connected i can mount the bltouch probe to the correct bracket this is the one for the ender 3 v2 the instructions say there are two m three by six screws and two m three by eight screws but my kit has four m three by six screws so i'll use two of them to mount the probe to the bracket according to the pictures in the instruction sheet the probe should be mounted so that the connector side of the probe faces the fan shroud so with the probe on the bracket it's time to mount the bracket to the x carriage there should be a pair of holes here for the express purpose of mounting this bracket but early versions of the ender 3v2 do not have the holes i know because i have a very early version of the ender 3v2 and hey guess what it doesn't have these holes and as a result i'm installing this on a newer ender 3v2 now i don't know what creality's position on this is if you buy the kit and it doesn't have the mounting holes will they send you a replacement x carriage that does i would hope so but i don't know if they did it would probably take a month to arrive so if you find yourself in that unfortunate situation and you're the slightest bit handy with tools you might just want to drill and tap those holes yourself so since this printer does have the required mounting holes i'll use the other two screws to attach the bracket to the x carriage and that's it for step two step three is securing the cable and connecting the other end of it to the main board i'll use the included zip ties for this to hold the bl touches cable to the existing cable bundle that goes back to the main board i would prefer to have this cable inside the cable sleeve but that can be a little bit of a challenge in the interest of brevity ant following the instruction sheet i'm doing the zip tie thing i'll clip off the extra zip tie bits later it's not pretty but it works and for the plugging in part i'm going to need to access the main board inside the electronics enclosure i'll remove the one screw on the top and the three screws on the bottom of the enclosure and carefully set the cover aside i'll plug the five pin connector into the bltouch port here it's keyed and it has a locking tab so it only goes in one way well it only goes in one way easily if you want to put it in backwards it probably takes a bit more force the cable needs to route out of the box here with the other cables and be careful because the edges of the aluminum can be sharp so not only can you accidentally cut yourself you could accidentally cut into the cables so now i'll reinstall the cover now remember the long screw goes in the back on the bottom so now that the bltouch probe is installed it's time to actually make use of the new probe and the new firmware now since i installed the bl touch firmware on the printer the zn stop switch is no longer being used so i'm going to remove it and i'll just tuck the connector in here oh watch this with the bltouch when you select auto home the x and y axes home as usual but then the printer moves them to position the nozzle over the center of the bed then the nozzle moves toward the bed to home the z-axis and when the probe triggers it backs up and then comes back down again slowly to get a more accurate reading now when homing the z-axis it probes the center of the bed because if x and y stayed at zero the probe wouldn't be over the bed's surface and then it wouldn't trigger and then the nozzle would crash into the bed so don't freak out when the bed and the nozzle move from their usual home positions immediately after they home and also once the z-axis is homed it moves up 10 millimeters because reasons i don't know why okay so now that the printer is home i need to set the z offset value that's the distance between the probes trigger point and the nozzle see the probe has to trigger before the nozzle gets to the bed and we need to figure out how far the nozzle is from the bed when that occurs then the printer can use that value so when we tell the printer to put the z-axis at the zero point it actually brings the nozzle down to the bed now i'm going to ignore the instruction sheet about setting the z offset for the probe because the instructions don't apply to this printer therefore an ender 3 pro not an ender 3v2 and the user interface is different so these instructions won't work actually i couldn't find any official instructions for setting the bltouch z offset on creality sites so here's what i was able to come up with after a bit of trial and error first i'm going to heat the bed to 60 degrees celsius because that's what i normally have it set at when i print when things heat up they expand so i want the bed at operating temperature and operating size before probing then when it's been at temperature for a few minutes i'll home the printer so remember earlier i said the nozzle moves up 10 millimeters after it homes yeah it just did that so i need to move it down to zero and that's in prepare move and move z i'll set it to zero so now that it's moved i can see how far away from the bed it really is when it thinks it's all the way down and it looks like it's a good two or three millimeters away from the bed so i'm going to adjust the z offset or as the screen says z office it's clearly a typo but i'll deal with it that's in pre-pair and z officed i'm going to set it to negative 2.0 i'm using a negative value because i want to pull the nozzle down toward the bed now sometimes when i do this the z-axis moves sometimes it moves up and sometimes it moves down so since i can't trust that it's actually moved two millimeters closer to the bed i'm gonna home the printer again with auto home and then i'm gonna move z to zero again and then i'm gonna perform another visual inspection and yeah the nozzle's closer but it's still a little far from the bed so i'll set the z offset to a more negative number and then i'm going to home the printer again and then i'm going to move z to zero and then i'm going to check the nozzles distance from the bed and i'm going to keep doing this until i get the nozzle to where a piece of paper is lightly pinched between the nozzle and the bed and the result is that for my printer the z offset value is negative 2.70 millimeters so great now that's done now i do want to address something that was brought up in the comments on my ender3v2 creality firmware update video last week and that is this when you set things like z offset values or acceleration values or other stuff from the screen and you save the configuration using the storage configuration menu item creality's firmware does not store these settings on the main board instead the settings are written to a file on the card so if you print with multiple cards you'll probably need to make sure you set and save the z offset value on each card that you're going to use in the printer i guess this could also pose a problem if you move the same card between multiple ender 3 v2s the settings stay with the card not with the printer so until creality releases firmware that stores the settings on the main board i'll just have to be careful with my cards or i'll have to compile vanilla marlin 2 for the inter 3v2 but that's not happening today so printing with a bed probe is a little different than you might be used to i like having it probe the bed before every print so if i change print surfaces i don't have to do anything special so to make that happen there's really only one thing that needs to change and that's the g-code command for homing the printer at the start of a print now this is shown here in the instructions they're showing it for the reality slicer which is cura but the change is the same for prusa slicer or any other slicer where you can adjust the starting g-code right after the line with g28 you'll add a line with g29 g28 is the g-code command to home all three axes and g29 is the command to probe the bed so from this point on any file that you slice will have the correct commands in the starting g-code files that you sliced prior to this won't obviously so they won't probe the bed before they print so you might want to re-slice any older files if you want to reprint them so i'll slice and print a quick leveling squares model just to make sure that everything's working this is something that i made in tinkercad it's just five 30 millimeter squares one layer high so it homes and it probes and then it prints the squares ideally each square should have a good surface finish and if you need to you can tweak the z offset from the tune menu these look like they're printing pretty well and they're done and that looks pretty good to me oh smooth okay so is a bed probe really necessary on a printer the size of the ender 3v2 well personally i've been able to get the bed height adjusted pretty much right where i want it most of the time the glass print surface that came with it is pretty darn flat now i've got other similarly sized printers where the bed dips a little in the middle and some somewhere it bows up a little in the middle and a bl touch probe is perfect for that situation it can sense the slight difference in height across the surface of the bed and then when the printer is printing they can keep the nozzle at the right distance from the bed on each layer having a bltouch also allows you to change print surfaces so if i wanted to remove the glass print surface and make my friend 3d printing llama happy by joining team blue tape i wouldn't have to make any adjustments to anything because the probe can feel where the print surface is so i guess the answer is on this particular printer owned by me it's not strictly necessary but it's convenient to have on printers where the bed isn't super flat i think it could help now there is something to be aware of with the bl touch when you first turn on the printer the probe performs a self-test deploying and retracting the probe pin a couple of times if the probe is too close to the bed when it does this the probe pin doesn't fully deploy and the bltouch gets angry and blinks red the quick fix for this is to raise the z-axis a little bit either by turning the lead screw or using the control panel and then turning the printer off and on again also be aware that probing adds a little under two minutes to the start of each print but given how long 3d prints usually take i don't think that's a big issue i've also noticed something weird every once in a while during probing the bltouch gets blinking red angry and i don't know why when this happens the printer stops probing the bed prematurely and then just goes ahead and prints anyway i kind of think it should stop and say something but it doesn't i tried capturing this on video but after starting 10 prints in a row with the camera rolling and not having a failure i gave up now the couple of times that it did happen i caught it out of the corner of my eye and so i still don't know what caused it to do that now also the instruction sheet directs you to go to creality.com download to get files but there's nothing there specific to the enter 3v2 with the bl touch i went to creality3dofficial.com download instead and worked my way down to the ender3v2 section to get the necessary firmware files the instruction sheet also says to scan the provided qr code for detailed instructions but doing that took me to a landing page that didn't really help i also searched the support forum on creality3d moncreality3dofficial.com and there wasn't anything specific to setting the z offset on the ender 3v2 so the process that i used in this video is one that i came up with on my own so creality if you're watching could you please fix the firmware so it saves the settings on the main board and also make the printer stop if the bltouch errors out before it finishes probing the bed also live z adjust would be an awesome addition making it super easy to get the z offset set while printing and accurate installation and usage instructions specific to each printer supported by this kit would be great so overall i like the bltouch on the ender3v2 the installation is easy and although it doesn't look pretty if you wanted to take the time you could feed the ribbon cable for the bltouch through the cable sleeves and make it look like it was factory installed i'd like to thank reality again for sending this to me to show to you and if you'd like to take a look at it on their site there's a link in the description well 3d printing friends that's about all the time we have for this episode and now that we're at the end let's level up and go print something cool hey real quick before you go i wanted to say thanks for being one of the super awesome people who sticks around all the way to the end and thanks for all the likes comments and shares and an especially big thanks to those who directly support what i do you're all wonderful for doing that and i really appreciate it if you liked this episode a thumbs up would be great and if you'd like to help support the channel check the description for ways you can do exactly that and hey if you haven't already subscribed please do it's absolutely free and it's an excellent way to help keep me making these videos for you well that's it for this one thanks again and i'll see you next time here on the bv 3d channel

Channel: BV3D: Bryan Vines

Views: 386,498

Keywords: ender-3v2, ender 3v2 bed leveling, ender 3v2 bltouch, ender 3v2 firmware update, ender-3 v2 3d printer, ender-3 v2 bltouch, ender-3 v2 3d printer upgrades, bltouch ender 3 v2, bltouch install, bltouch ender 3 v2 install, bltouch ender 3 v2 firmware, ender 3 v2 bltouch install guide, ender 3 v2 bltouch wiring, creality ender 3 v2 bltouch firmware, ender 3 v2, bl touch ender 3 v2, ender 3 v2 bed leveling, ender 3 v2 bltouch firmware, ender 3 v2 bltouch

Id: NDe6QXreBNs

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021