Sunday 14 February 2016

Tackling the good old "auto bed leveling" problem

Greetings all

So, I've been building the same 3d printer for 2 years now (A reprap morgan) and although frustrating, I'm loving every second of it.
Alongside my (unfinished 3D printer), I started building a variant of the rostock mini for a family member. I find the concept of auto bed leveling appealing...not necessary, but more of a nice to have imho.

Now, the usual way of bed leveling is that probe that gets engaged  by the belt and then it moves along the bed in the usual fashion,

There is alos a servo isk micro switch solotion like this

But more moving parts = more that can go wrong (imo)

Then I saw Steve Graber's video on YouTube, this concept stayed stuck in the back of my mind, but wasn't exactly what I wanted (the tilting looked a tad wonkey...and he didn't provide links to the files)

After a while I saw the concept of using Force Sensing Resistors on the bed of the printer for bed leveling, brilliant expect for the fact that you could not use a heated bed (as the head would affect the resistors)


Seeing that I want to be able to upgrade the printer in the future with a heated bed< and took a liking to the FSR concept I kept searching....and came across edlep's FSR Groove Mount for a hot end on Thingiverse link

Finally a solution that I really like...until I started trying to source some FSR's. So I'm from South Africa, and our currency is shot recently, these ended up as a non viable solution.
I did not give up how ever, remember Steve Graber's system I talked about earlier (having a micro switch attached to the hot end) now I thought that would be a great concept if combined with this...so I did a quick mockup.

Ladies and gent I present to you an alternative solution to an already solved problem.




Unfortunately, seeing as my printer is not done yet I cant show a working prototype yet, so if anyone is interested in giving this a go give me a shout and I'll upload the files.

Any C&C is welcome, as this is my first post here on the forums.

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