Z Offset in Klipper - The Right Way?

[Music] hey guys welcome back to hio Prince today I want to take a few minutes and explain my version of how I do Z offset setting on a 3D printer that runs Clipper and I want to explain how I do Z offset so let's talk about in general terms what is z offset Z offset is a correction factor or a corrective adjustment to the relative pos position between your extruder and or the your hot and nozzle and your print B so when in your slicer you set a certain first layer height let's say. 3 mm then the machine based on the input that you have given the machine during your Z offset it will move to a position above your print bed and start printing if this position above your print bed considering that we just told the printer to do a 3 mm uh uh first layer height if this position is too high then the first layer will not adhere to your bed very well if you have fed your Clipper Clipper configuration your printer um information that is such that the nozzle is too close to your printer bed then the the first layer will be not 3 mm but it will be squished too much and that is also negative so you want the printer to print a layer that is.3 mm and the the clippered machine the little single board computer that does all the magic and runs the Pixies around um calculates based on your adjustments on your Z offset where it needs to be to achieve that if your Z offset is incorrect then this first layer will fail it will either be too squished or it will be not squished enough and it will not adhere to your bit so now if you look around on the internet there's lots of Reddit post and there's stuff on GitHub and there is stuff on uh just the documentation for Clipper uh there are videos of the printer manufacturers that will tell you how to do the Z offset and in very many many many cases it always involves a piece of paper the part that I don't understand is why this is such a a uh widely accepted uh concept that your Z offset so the distance between your nozzle and your print bed is always the thickness of a piece of paper or maybe a double layer of paper or like a business card thickness why that is so accepted actually the only video where I uh have heard someone talk about the same concept as I will explain here today um in very broad stroke short like two sentences is uh the Australian guy from makeer Muse he mentioned that before um so I do not use paper I use a fer gauge and how I correct the height of my nozzle in relationship to the print bed with a z offset function in uh the main cell user interface is by placing the nozzle at a specific height above the bed at least you know where the printer thinks it it should be so I tell the printer to go to a height above the print bed of3 mm and then I take a I I bought an extra long fer gauge gauge so I have you know lots of flexibility here I take a 3 mm fer gauge I place my nozzle z- axis3 mm then my printer drives the nozzle to what it thinks 3 mm should be and then I stick my fer gauge in there and then I will find out oh it's way too loose or it's too tight and then I used the Z offset correction section on the user interface and move the nozzle either either up or down until my nozzle pinches the feeler gauge ever so slightly just so you feel there is some contact there it doesn't need to be much and then I save the config and I know this was very theoretical in just in words hi go rambling in front of the camera let's just do it together all right so I have set up my main sale user interface of my printer with webcam so yeah let's point that down a little bit like that so that you can see me talking but you can also see what I'm doing on the screen so uh first thing let's do temperature we're going to set the nozzle temperature to 200 and we're setting the beted to 60 those are you know for pla pretty standard values we let this heat up real quick in the meantime we want to home the printer and as you can see it's doing that it's running all the X and now it's going to probe the bed right and the probe is the inductive type it reacts to my metal print bed and it assumes okay I know where I'm at and here's the the Z height so to speak then I don't know if you can see my my uh pointer here Z is now sitting at 10 mm above the bed so z uh 10 mm is literally the distance between the nozzle and the bed at least that's what the Clipper computer assumes right if I would now put it to zero it should touch the bed since we have a fancy magnetic metal print sheet with like some Pei coding on there we don't always want to touch down right onto the bed because if our Z offset is wrong and the nozzle actually goes too low it might damage the bed or it damages the brass nozzle and we don't want to have that happen so what I'm going to do is I'm going to set it you could set it at 0.5 mm if you wanted to but here in my case we're going to use3 mm3 mm and press enter oh and there's already some oozing going on uh you got to make sure that you don't have any um filament on your nozzle because that might affect a error in your Z offset so now the print head has moved to what it thinks or what the computer thinks 3 mm is now we're going to take a fer gauge where is it there's 1.3 mm fer gauge in here and we're going to shove this between the bed and the nozzle yeah and uh that also kind of pushes the if there's a little ooze of um filament it will push that out of the way so now I have my point 3 mm fer gauge between the nozzle and the bed and it's too loose so now let's look at the screen here real quick below this uh below the section where you can just move your axes around so if you want to move your xaxis or Y axis around you can just click on Plus+ 10 and it just moves there below that section is a z offset currently we're at. 3 mm and my Z offset is zero so the corrective little incremental movements that will correct the position of your nozzle in relationship to the bed so as I just said the computer thinks it's AT3 millim above your print bed but my fer gauge just confirmed that it is a little high because the fer gauge is loose in there there is no friction whatsoever we don't want much friction but we want to feel that the nozzle and the bed both make contact with this thing currently we're too high so with the Z offset section down here you make a correction so the computer will continue to think it's AT3 mm but where that reference is where that3 position is you will correct by either minus bringing the nozzle down or by plus bringing the nozzle up so fer gauge in here it's always a little complicated to do um my left hand um my my pointer here is right on minus1 mm that's 100 of a millimeter so we're right there I have my fer gauge there and I'm just going to click so now the nozzle is coming down little increments of 100s of a millimeter until I feel that I have some friction oh we're getting there one more no not yet oh so now I have ever so slightly a little bit of friction between the nozzle and the uh the print bed now I could potentially do another 5,000 of a millimeter let's do that that's half hunds right so 5,000 of a millimeter just to increase the friction ever so slightly so that feels pretty good to me uh you will have to experiment that with that a little bit so we just made a incremental correction of where that3 mm is if you look up here position absolute we haven't moved the z-axis it's still saying. 3 mm we just corrected where that3 mm is and we actually right above in parenthesis um it it shows a relative position from our little incremental step Downs it will still show3 mm but we have corrected where 3 mm is right right above the Z opposite section and we just moved it down by 85 mm is a clear so we could bring it back to zero or a save button if I click on Save right now it will do save config yes then it does a quick little restart Clipper report start up and here we go initialize and and so now we have to home again because now the printer just lost its brain it doesn't know where it is anymore if I now rehome the whole thing uh first thing uh the the Clipper always does is raises the tool head so you're not scraping your tool head across your bed and then it homes again with a nozzle uh not with a nozzle but with the inductive probe and it moves to where it thinks 10 mm above the bed is now we're going to put it back our temperatures by the way they were also turned off so we're just going to um re-engage the heating here just so that we have the same conditions we bring the temperature back up where it was that only takes a few seconds as you guys know the extruder or the the hot end really heats up qu quick and the bed was still at 58.6 De and it's slowly coming back up to uh 60 so we're already back there so now I'm going to use uh my keyboard keyboard again put. 3 mm in here it moves the nozzle to where it thinks 3 is and we again use the3 mm fer gauge and shove it right in between the bed and the nozzle again pushing a little bit of the uh oozing uh filament out there is friction I still find this a little too loose so sometimes you have to uh do this a couple times just until you know you get it just so I'm just going to bring it down maybe another hundreds of a millimeter yeah we're already there that feels pretty good maybe let's give it another yeah this is perfect so we we just did another slight correction uh this will be followed up by another save save config and then it reinitializes we're going to do that like two or three times five minutes later so we don't need to do any more adjustments currently the print head is exactly. 3 mm above the print bed at least in that location um and now if you start a print and the uh slicer here let's let's look at a slicer real quick slicer I use pra slicer and uh here it is let's open this wide um so if you go into your print settings you always have first layer height and then you have layer height that's all the subsequent layers right um here in this case first layer height is.3 mm instead of just talking about it I think we're just going to here I think I have a I have a thumb drive oh here we go okay there it is and in here we have some print projects oh know why it opens that there is a first layer hex which we're going to be using here and we're going to um scale this up a little bit we're going to do what are we going to do we're going to do 200% of the size or 220% and here as well we don't want to make it thicker that's why I took the scale factor off here all right now we have a big old hex on here right so we can uh locate that in the middle we can slice it now it did a slicing there is a little bit of a yeah let's see that we don't have a brim or a I don't want to have any out no Auto brim it just has a skirt around it that's good enough so that's good let's let's transfer it over it will do a Clipper Advanced mesh and purging what that means is it will only mesh the area where you actually print on which then brings the mesh points closer together and make it more accurate so it gets a more accurate picture of how hill and dale your print bed is so if you run Clipper in some shape or form Sonic pad maybe you have a sovel printer and you just bought one of those sovel Clipper Clipper pads or you have a Raspberry Pi running Clipper if you don't use km get it install it configure it it's great so let's um upload this to the printer here so the the transfer over to my printer is already done so we can close this up and now you see it's it's homing we're already at temperature so that's pretty good so that was just a the Z homing there for a second and now it does the camp mesh Clipper adaptive meshing and purging okay so that's what that stands for so now it really only measures the area where the print object is going to be and as you can see up here in the status section I actually have a visual representation of the part on my print bed which is really cool let's say you have 20 Parts on your print bed it shows 20 little parts and if something goes sideways and one of your 20 Parts tips over you can exclude that and keep printing the other ones and that is actually pretty nifty now we're going to see if my uh probing that we did no not my probing my Z off setting 2.3 millim above the bed so we are just correcting the height above the bed with a fer gauge and the correction is done down here in this Z offset section if that is a good idea or [Music] not [Music] for [Music] [Music] [Music] all right guys I was just talking to myself so I I peeled the build sheet off here is uh the part that we just printed I already pulled the the brim off just one layer brim or skirt I should say it's a skirt so white is a little bit bad color to show details um but uh the texture from from the build sheet is nicely imprinted on the the first layer here and then um the individual lines adhere to each other really well so I cannot pull it apart and overall this turned out really well instead of using a piece of paper I set my print head my nozzle to be exactly zeroed so if I punch in zero nozzle touches bed if I punch in 3 mm or 4 mm A4 mm fer gauge will fit in there and if it doesn't then I use the Z offset section down in uh the main cell user interface and bring it down and make it just so and then save the config and then it's pretty much good to go and if your printer is very stable and it doesn't lose its uh adjustment or position very easily you can do the Z offset adjustment and as long as you don't switch to a different build sheet you should be good to go for many many prints you don't have to do Z offset every single time so occasionally maybe if I change a nozzle clean a nozzle maybe if I change something on the printer mess with some adjustments after that I will do a z offset if I don't do that I just leave it alone and yeah it works so give it a try I know this is a controversial topic that's why there are so many videos out there about Z offset don't rip me apart I'm also just a 3D printing hobbyist um I I've been called names on forums and I have been told I'm uh ignorant and whatnot but this is just my experience this is what I've experimented with and it works for me and I just thought I share that with you guys so there it is you guys take care I see you in the next one bye [Music] he

Channel: Heiko Prints

Views: 3,631

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Id: A6DGF5YikG8

Length: 22min 10sec (1330 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 12 2023