Six popular ABL probes compared: Accuracy, price, wiring and more!

which abl probe is best in this video i'm going to compare six of the most popular probes to find out which comes out on top [Music] this video started life as a patreon request try out this new infrared probe that neither of us had used before and compare its accuracy against other popular probes so here we are tom made a great video doing just this about four years ago so please consider this a sequel with more modern popular probes to begin with we'll quickly examine why you might need an abl probe for most 3d printers we have a manual leveling procedure where the aim is to match the bed to the plane the nozzle travels on many 3d printed beds however are just not flat and no amount of manual leveling will fix this in these cases it's hard to get a good first layer across the bed because the gap between the nozzle and the bed will vary enter auto bed leveling where a probe measures the vertical height of several positions building up a mesh of the bed and this means the firmware can adjust the first layer to ride the contours of the bed and that lets us print perfect first layers the whole way across hopefully you can understand that this probing needs to be quite accurate because if the vertical measurements are off the contours that the firmware tries to follow won't match the actual bed and our first layer is going to be off as a result so which ones are we going to test first up we've got a humble micro switch but more specifically we're testing a version made for this job with a pointier tip we have the ant clubs bltouch and i have two different versions to test the touch me is a little more obscure but i have one on hand so why not throw it in we have the infrared sensor from oz3d that inspired the video we have the latest and greatest from prusa the supermender and this is the basis of the prusa mini plus upgrade kit and finally the easy abl pro from th 3d another very popular option for auto bed leveling one option i'm not testing is a creality cr touch mainly because i don't have one on hand but also because it seems to be a more expensive clone of the bl touch while i haven't used one personally some of my patrons report that it works quite well it's worth noting that most firmwares support manually probing a mesh which means you don't need any of these probes and i have a video on that linked below with all of our candidates lined up i'll explain how i'm going to be comparing them and then we'll get straight into it when tom made his original video he had to build his own testing apparatus it was designed to repeatedly trigger the probe taking measurements it was all run on custom software and the data would allow him to calculate standard deviation these days it's so much easier to test the accuracy of a probe as the test is built into the firmware such as m48 for marlin and the probe accuracy command for clipper which i'll be using in this video so the hardest part for me was designing simple adapters to suit all of these probes and then wiring each probe to the main board and configuring the firmware to suit for each probe i test it at three different probing feed rates five millimeters per second ten millimeters per second and thirty millimeters per second the aim is to find out whether some probes need to be moved slowly for sufficient accuracy while glass was my default probing surface i also tested on spring steel sheets covered in both textured and smooth pei coatings to see if that made any difference my baseline probing was done with the bed at roop temperature but i also tested setting it to 60 degrees giving it 10 minutes to reach the temperature and then settle and this would let me test which probes were affected by temperature and if there was any interference from the heater being on each individual test consists of probing the same point 10 times in a row the firmware reports the measured height for each of these and then at the end calculates the standard deviation this is a statistic that measures the variation from average and the smaller the number the firmware tells us the more repeatable the probe readings are each test was repeated three times with the values entered into a spreadsheet where a formula would then calculate the average of the three standard deviation results beyond the accuracy testing i'm also measuring the weight of each probe although my scales aren't super accurate and when necessary i've tried to support the cable to remove it from the weight measurement i've also included price converted to us dollars for consistency and we'll briefly look at ease of installation in terms of wiring firmware and support first cap off the rank is a detachable micro switch the same type of micro switch that's used for homing around the printer although in this test we're using one with a pointy tip which i would expect to be more accurate micro switches are really light and really cheap and they don't require any additional wiring over a regular z end stop the one on my test printer clips on magnetically and then is plugged in temporarily for probing which means you can't leave it in place to probe before every print i found this probe to be surprisingly accurate as you can see many times the 10 probes were exactly the same measurement and there wasn't much variation until we increased the speed to 30 millimeters per second the type of surface and whether the heater was on was largely irrelevant if you're not looking to probe the bed before every print and instead probe every now and again and store the mesh this type of setup is pretty ideal next up is the oz3d ir z probe 1.4 it's australian designed and it was nice to be able to get it locally and those in europe have an option to buy it too i've never used this type of probe before but duet do sell the same type of infrared probe so it's not a new idea if you're wondering about the funny mounting it's actually designed to be bolted onto a 30 millimeter heatsink fan a really nice wiki page is provided that goes through the specifications of the probe a change log wiring for various main boards links for setting up in firmware and all of the physical dimensions which was ideal for designing my mount its operation is quite clever we have two infrared leds pointing down and an infrared receiver when an object gets close enough the receiver will pick up the reflected light from the infrared leds and the probe is triggered wiring is simple we need to provide 5 volts ground and then a trigger signal back to the main board accuracy for this probe was excellent even on a textured surface where i was curious to see if the reflection of the light would be disrupted but as it turns out this probe was quite consistent regardless of speed or the bed surface it was being tested with it regularly reported all 10 probes exactly the same with very little variation otherwise availability is the main problem so if you can get one it looks to be a winner so how about something really popular like the bl touch it's one of the more expensive items here at almost 40 dollars plus the cable but it's also one of the lightest at only 7 grams the bl touch is one of the established players originally launched in 2015 and we have an excellent information page with everything we need for configuring firmware understanding how it works the manual commands needed to operate it and the physical dimensions furthermore i have a page on my website dedicated to installing it setting up the firmware and also some troubleshooting probably the biggest downside is the complexity of operation and the complexity of installation we have one set of wires to connect to and control the bltouch sending pwm signals which protract and retract the pin amongst other things then we have a second set of cables that is used to send the trigger signal back to the main board it is rare but in the event of a catastrophic print failure it's possible for the probing pin to break off accuracy results for the bl touch were once again very good i tested an older version too as well as an out of the box new version 3.1 the results were slightly worse on the older model but that's probably due to wear and tear as i've had it for some years like the other probes the 3.1 regularly recorded no deviation between 10 probes and when there was variation it was very little being a mechanical probe it didn't care about the surface or whether or not the heater was on the bl touch remains an excellent choice with a lot of community support another popular option particularly on creality printers is the easy abl pro by th 3d there are two versions both for the same price but the mini is half the weight so i'd recommend going with that i've made a video testing this probe before in conjunction with the th 3d easy board light main board this is the most expensive probe here but it does come with this control board to make wiring it up extremely easy you plug in your existing zn stop wire plug in the probe and then supply a 12 to 24 volt power source and your wiring is complete in terms of firmware tx 3d supply this web page where we simply select the options we want for our firmware and the firmware binary is provided for download without us messing with any firmware source one potential downside of this sensor is that it requires calibration for the surface and temperature that you're using it's really not very hard but it is an added step over a mechanical probe probing accuracy like everything we've tested so far was very good in fact with a glass surface this was the best probe of the bunch across all speeds there was zero variation from 270 individual probes when testing the other surfaces the variation was very little and i was pleased to find that having the heater on didn't affect the probe accuracy at all this system costs more than other probes but if you are looking for a streamlined experience it might be for you what about the latest proximity sensor from prusa the super pender as fitted to the prusa mini plus previously prusa probes required four wires because i had it in built thermistor but for the super pender it's no longer required and this means we have a simplified connection with only 5 volts ground and an output signal it took a long time before these were in stock but keep in mind that unless you own a prusa printer you're not going to be able to buy one because spare parts are only available to purchase if you already own a prusa machine another important thing to note is that the sensor will only trigger on metal objects and that means that all of my accuracy testing had to be done on top of the spring steel sheet both smooth and textured and once again the results were very good there was many sets of 10 probes where there was zero variation and when there was variation it was once again very little if you have a metal bed and you're able to order one these are quite a good choice for non-prusa printers the last probe we're testing is to touch me from france it's fairly cheap quite light but you may not have heard of it so let me explain the probing pin is held in place by a magnetic ball bearing and we have a stationary magnet somewhere on the machine to move this ball bearing out of the way and then to lower down the pin where it can be used for probing when you're done you move the print head towards the bed and the magnet will hold the probe out of the way the wiring and firmware are very easy for this probe requiring only 5 volts ground and a trigger signal back to the main board but because of its unique approach we end up with an area on the bed that we can't use during printing if we come too close to it the magnet will make the probe drop and then it will hang low and collide another downside for some people is that all of the documentation is in french would you believe me if i told you the probing accuracy for this model was also very good like many of the other probes there were many samples taken where there was zero variation in the result and when there was variation once again this was quite small just like the bl touch being a mechanical probe means we can change the surface it will turn on heaters and our results will remain the same with all of my results in place it makes sense to try and determine which of these probes is the most accurate now i have linked this full spreadsheet below in the description but it is really a bit of a trap it's easy to look at the results and misinterpret the numbers for instance seeing a number of 0 versus 292 which seems to be a dramatic difference most of the time when the number wasn't zero it's because out of the 10 probes one or two had a tiny tiny variation this single probe is only 0.01 of a millimeter different to the others but appears to produce a significant variation let's put this in perspective with a scale diagram starting with a 0.2 millimeter layer on a 3d print a layer height of 0.1 millimeters is considered fine for fdm printing and we can go a step smaller with the size of an average human hair and now let's introduce something much much smaller than that this blue bar represents the standard deviation of the worst result on the whole spreadsheet as you can see it's absolutely minuscule and it's completely insignificant for our 3d printing so the burning question which of these probes should you choose well in terms of accuracy they're all way better than what we require for fdm 3d printing based on my testing results accuracy should not be a determining factor when making a selection between them instead i would advise making a choice based on price ease of installation weight availability and so forth compare these things and then pick the best one that suits you and your circumstances if you want to tell the world what your favorite probe is and why the comments section is down below thank you so much for watching and until next time happy 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

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 51,034

Rating: 4.9214144 out of 5

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printed, 3d printer, 3d print, abl, auto bed levelling, auto bed leveling, probe, comparison, shoot out, best, compared, accurate, accuracy, ezabl, ir probe, th3d, aus3d, prusa, superpinda, mini, bltouch, mesh, manual, warped bed, touch mi, price, budget, installation, firmware, cost, wiring, advantages, disadvantages, pros, cons, strengths, weaknesses, m48, probe_accuracy, marlin, klipper, flsun, super racer, delta

Id: 2o8woJfTEVc

Length: 14min 2sec (842 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021