April 27, 2012
How to get better results from your 3D printer? At least the print bed should be exactingly level. But for many Reprapers this is really a pain - Have you tried to move the screws again and again to lower or raise the bed?
Thingiverse user atntias is developing a simple solution for solving the problem on an aluminum bed. atntias wrote the code as a part of printrun for his project, named as Auto Leveling Platform. He applied a small voltage to the tip of hot end and used his code to probe the bed surface to measure distances from head to bed on all the working area. Then he took that data and used it as a GCode offset accordingly.
"I can probe the surface by replacing the z end stop with 2 wires: one goes to the aluminum bed and the other to the extruder nozzle/drilling head."
Though someone has a working EMC script to do this already but it is pretty cool to have it in 3D printing.
Check out the video below to see the bed leveling process with his mantis based printed drilling head.
Bernhard Kubicek who is actively developing on the Marlin firmware and also built the UltiController panel for the Ultimaker just posted his very cool work on dynamic print bed adjustments within Marlin's source code.
"Using a NxN array of necessary height-offsets, in this case 3 points=2x2 quadratic areas, the height of the moves compensates for possible print-bed height deviations. This is done using bilinear interpolation. For this demo, the corners are at 0 height, while the center point is lifted 5mm. Its just for software debugging/demonstration purposes. However, the bed seems to "breath", like the whole machine is sentient."
Watch the video Marlin z-autoleveling demo from Bernhard Kubicek. More information is available on Bernhard Kubicek's site.
Thanks Florian for the great tip!
Posted in 3D Printing Technology
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