ULTRA FAST PROBING with Marlin firmware - 3x3 mesh in under 30 seconds!

in this video we'll bring the time for battling a 3x3 mesh from 73 seconds down to astonishing 29 seconds and an 8x8 mesh will be done in under 2 minutes i've talked about installing bat leveling probes in quite a few videos but we've never talked about that this whole autobad leveling process is pretty slow by default when you're installing a bltouch a cr touch or another probe like this inductive probe on a 3d printer most likely you will also have to make some changes in the firmware of the printer at least you will turn on the probe in the printer menu if the firmware of the printer already supports a probe however since most of these printers run modern firmware in a more or less default configuration enabling these probes will most likely not give you the best experience for two main reasons first by default the bed leveling is only doing a three by three mesh which can work but it's leaving a lot of space unprobed where there could be differences in height as i figured at least for my printers so you probably want more mesh points i'm using an 8x8 mesh on my ender printers which we'll see in a second this gives me quite accurate results but you could also use a 4x4 or 5x5 mesh which should already be fine enough secondly the probing procedure itself has some really slow default settings so it takes quite a while from starting the probing to the actual start of the print by default making a 3x3 mesh with the bl touch takes this end of 3v2 about 73 seconds a 4x4 mesh is done in 118 seconds and my 8x8 mesh for example takes a whopping 412 seconds in the default settings so we absolutely want to reduce this quite a bit the variance for all of these default speed tests seems to be around 0.25 millimeter or less variance is the absolute difference between the highest and lowest measured point and we should aim not to increase that significantly if we make the probing faster we're not so much interested in the absolute value so they might be different every single time the printer probes but the variance should more or less stay the same for consistent results for visualizing the mesh i'm using octoprint with the bat visualizer plugin i'm gonna make some assumptions at this point you know how to build marlin firmware for your printer either using platform io arduino ide or the firmware factory second you know how to enable auto bed leveling for your probe in marlin firmware and you also know how to flash that firmware to your printer if any of those things is unclear to you yet i have videos for each of these topics on my channel the links are in the description of this video so you can watch them as a kickstarter let's have a look at the first problem that affects the probing speed specifically for the bltouch and its year touch sensors these sensors have a retractable nozzle that is used to probe the set distance by default this nozzle gets retracted fully for every single probing point this makes probing quite slow so the first thing we want to enable in our configuration is a switch called bltouch hs mode in configuration underscore adv.h that's the bltouch high-speed probing mode sounds promising right just this little change will make probing quite a bit faster the probe is not fully retracted for every single point and the center will immediately raise the z-axis when the probe triggers and so it will stay down and the printer can continue moving to the next point much faster and then can start probing for the next point also much quicker the second setting i would change in configuration adb.h is the bl touch delay which i have set to 300 instead of the default 500. this will make the bltouch ncr touch react slightly faster to commands another tip in some printer configuration there might be the multiple probing setting in configuration.h enabled we'll make sure this is disabled otherwise the printer would at least do two probings for each point a faster one and a slower one we will therefore disable multiple probing in configuration.h to just go for the fast probing with these changes in place the printer will do the three by three mesh already in 59 seconds instead of the previous 73 seconds that's 19 faster variance for all measured mesh sizes is at 0.26 or below but we're not done yet we reduce the time even further let's now have a look at the set probing speed that probing speed is the speed at which the probe will go down towards the bed to get triggered and how fast it gets raised thereafter there is a fast probing speed and a slow probing speed since we already have disabled the option multiple probing we're just left with the setting that probe feed rate fast in configuration.h which are now setting to 20 times 60 instead of the default 4x60 these values represent millimeter per minute opposed to other settings in marlin that represent millimeter per second as you'll see in a second i know it's a bit strange but that's the reason having set the set probe feed rate to this higher value you should also adapt the printer's default max feed rate setting in configuration.h for the z-axis to this higher value if you don't do that the higher that probing speed will not take effect because this default max feed rate ultimately will limit all movements of a given axis to those maximum values i'm setting the zmax feed rate to 20 millimeter per second so it will correspond with our set probe feed rate fast setting of 20 times 60 millimeter per minute here you see this value is about millimeter per second the other one millimeter per minute but they essentially are the same by the way the default max feed rate values are the only settings that you can change later with gcode commands and which gets saved into the eeprom all the other settings mentioned in this tutorial are unfortunately hard coded in the firmware and require a rebuild and reflash if changed with these settings in place we do another build and flash to the printer but our probing time hasn't changed why is that it's because as i said the zed probe feed rate fast might be limited by what is set to the eeprom of the printer the default max free trade is only applied when the eeprom gets a reset to the default values and that can happen if you flash a new firmware but it doesn't have to let's check the current values for the maximum feed rates by sending an m203 command to the printer here you go the maximum feed rate for that is still at five millimeter per second because that was saved to the eeprom last so let's try to set it to 20 as we actually want it to be and then save everything with the final m500 you probably realize that by changing this max feed rate value in the eprom we can actually change the fast probing speed for the z-axis to any value equal or below what we have set to set probe feed rate fast i will use this to try out multiple set probing speeds without refreshing the firmware and i will compare the change in variance of the probing results so for a set feed rate of 20 millimeter per second we get the probing time of a three by three mesh down to 33 seconds with a variance of 0.239 and setting it to 15 gets us 32 seconds at a variance of 0.237 finally a rate of 10 gets us 31 seconds of probing time with a variance of 0.228 looking back at all these measurements i would conclude that the sweet spot for offset probing speed regarding the variance and the decrease of probing time is probably at 10 millimeter per second and that value still gets me consistent first layer adhesion over dozens of prints so far on this end of 3v2 as a last thing let's try to push up the x and y probing speed which a print uses to move the nozzle to the next probing point after a probing has been done we can save some time there too i'm setting xy probe feed rate and configuration.h to a value of 150 times 60 millimeter per minute which should be achievable i also figured that the probe moves up quite a bit after each point there is a setting that influences the amount of clearance between probing points and i think we can go a bit lower to save some time so i'm setting set clearance between probes in configuration.h from five to three millimeter after rebuilding and reflashing our total printing time for the three by three mesh at a probing speed of 10 millimeter per second is at 29 seconds the variance is still pretty low at 0.21 millimeter probing time for a 4x4 mesh is 41 seconds and 5x5 mesh is done at 55 seconds and a crazy large 8x8 mesh is done in 110 seconds so under two minutes i kept my promise there is a bonus setting i have changed the homing feed rates with homing feed rate millimeter per meter in configuration.h to higher values of 150 times 60 millimeter per minute for x and y and 10 times 64 z so homing is now also much much faster here is an overview of all the settings and their corresponding values i did in the two configuration files you also find those in a blog post on my website linked down in the description as well as a link to the firmware factory configuration of my printer so you can reuse that i hope you found this video helpful if so please treat me with a like and probably watch this video from my channel next and i see you the next one bye [Music] you

Channel: Crosslink

Views: 44,244

Keywords: crosslink, 3dprinting, 3dprinter, additivemanufacturing, 3d printer, howto, tutorial, daniel kreuzhofer, daniel crosslink, marlin firmware, marlin, marlin firmware bltouch, bltouch marlin, ender 3 v2, ender 3 pro, ender 3

Id: PFuz8915GCs

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022