This came up in the Creality Discord a while back, I've been meaning to mention it.
problem: "I can't get my bed leveling system to work. I am using a Prusa style sensor with an Ender 3V2. (etc etc) "
The Enders have glass beds. The Prusa sensors are inductive, which cannot detect a glass bed. Inductive sensors only interact with metals.
An inductive sensor will operate on an Ender, but you would need to change to a metal bed (ugh, why), or better, change to a capacitive sensor, which will detect any surface. It turns out that a mechanical switch like a microswitch, or an E/M sensor attached to a mechanical switch, has the best accuracy and repeatability of every sensor that multiple people have tested. Amazingly, in this at least, multiple testers' results all agreed. Except for the one fellow who built a horizontal test jig for stuff that works vertically against gravity (WTF OOPS) and sooprahz, sooprahz, sooprahz! All his results for the mechanical sensors were worse than everybody else's... >_< But anyway. IOW, if you have a BL Touch or equivalent, you're good, you can probably stop thinking about bed leveling upgrades. ;)
Just as an aside, I have heard from some folks that were clearly unclear about how ABL works. This is understandable. It can be non-intuitive.
So, let's take my Ender 3V2 for example. It has a glass bed, but I have a mechanical 'BL Touch' type leveling sensor. Not only do we install a physical sensor on the hot end carriage, we must also install a firmware update to the little microSD card that runs the printer (in my case) because we are adding functionality to the machine which it did not have when it left the factory. How the install is done, the firmware used, etc, can vary from printer to printer, and it's off topic to try to explain several different ways, so I won't try.
Once the tech is installed, there is either a new menu or a menu item, in your printer's GUI. You use this to "scan" the bed at a selected number of points. Then the firmware moves about the bed, measuring the height of each point. This creates a new "mesh" which is simply a digital map of the bed's humps and valleys. You could just use this information to manually level the bed, and to a degree, I do this, just to get the bed to within spitting distance of level.
But that is not where the beauty of ABL lies.
Because the mesh is also used by the firmware while printing; it moves the head (or bed, depending on printer - in the Z axis anyhow) up and down as it prints, to follow the real contours of the bed as it is, leveled or not! This is dynamic virtual leveling, it is bad-ass, and you want it.
Even if your bed is so messed up it will never be level, ABL will make that problem go away. Scanning for a new mesh if fully automated, just click on a menu item, it takes only a few minutes, and you should only need to do this when you have moved or bumped your printer, cleaned the bed vigorously, etc. You won't be doing it all the time.
This action is faded out as the print continues and for most prints, it can be faded out completely after 10 or 20 layers. That's usually a simple setting in the printer's control panel, under the ABL menu item. That's how the obviously-distorted first few layers transition to normal, straight, printing. The first few layers may be distorted slightly (in the Z axis) but because they follow the bed's real contours perfectly, first layer adhesion is vastly improved, and that's really what this is all about. Keep spaghetti on the dinner table!
So, a bed could be really messed up, to the extent that you couldn't even print on it without ABL, yet with ABL, it will print, and it will print just fine. My own Ender 3V2 has a leveling screw at each corner, but the ABL mesh reveals that no matter how much manual leveling I try, in an effort to get the four corners and center to more-or-less agree, and it's not quite possible.
ABL permits you to have a perfect virtual bed, even if the real bed is not perfect.
Out of all the upgrades and tweaks I've made to my humble bed-slinger, ABL has been the best bargain.
An inductive sensor will operate on an Ender, but you would need to change to a metal bed (ugh, why), or better, change to a capacitive sensor, which will detect any surface. It turns out that a mechanical switch like a microswitch, or an E/M sensor attached to a mechanical switch, has the best accuracy and repeatability of every sensor that multiple people have tested. Amazingly, in this at least, multiple testers' results all agreed. Except for the one fellow who built a horizontal test jig for stuff that works vertically against gravity (WTF OOPS) and sooprahz, sooprahz, sooprahz! All his results for the mechanical sensors were worse than everybody else's... >_< But anyway. IOW, if you have a BL Touch or equivalent, you're good, you can probably stop thinking about bed leveling upgrades. ;)
Just as an aside, I have heard from some folks that were clearly unclear about how ABL works. This is understandable. It can be non-intuitive.
So, let's take my Ender 3V2 for example. It has a glass bed, but I have a mechanical 'BL Touch' type leveling sensor. Not only do we install a physical sensor on the hot end carriage, we must also install a firmware update to the little microSD card that runs the printer (in my case) because we are adding functionality to the machine which it did not have when it left the factory. How the install is done, the firmware used, etc, can vary from printer to printer, and it's off topic to try to explain several different ways, so I won't try.
Once the tech is installed, there is either a new menu or a menu item, in your printer's GUI. You use this to "scan" the bed at a selected number of points. Then the firmware moves about the bed, measuring the height of each point. This creates a new "mesh" which is simply a digital map of the bed's humps and valleys. You could just use this information to manually level the bed, and to a degree, I do this, just to get the bed to within spitting distance of level.
But that is not where the beauty of ABL lies.
Because the mesh is also used by the firmware while printing; it moves the head (or bed, depending on printer - in the Z axis anyhow) up and down as it prints, to follow the real contours of the bed as it is, leveled or not! This is dynamic virtual leveling, it is bad-ass, and you want it.
Even if your bed is so messed up it will never be level, ABL will make that problem go away. Scanning for a new mesh if fully automated, just click on a menu item, it takes only a few minutes, and you should only need to do this when you have moved or bumped your printer, cleaned the bed vigorously, etc. You won't be doing it all the time.
This action is faded out as the print continues and for most prints, it can be faded out completely after 10 or 20 layers. That's usually a simple setting in the printer's control panel, under the ABL menu item. That's how the obviously-distorted first few layers transition to normal, straight, printing. The first few layers may be distorted slightly (in the Z axis) but because they follow the bed's real contours perfectly, first layer adhesion is vastly improved, and that's really what this is all about. Keep spaghetti on the dinner table!
So, a bed could be really messed up, to the extent that you couldn't even print on it without ABL, yet with ABL, it will print, and it will print just fine. My own Ender 3V2 has a leveling screw at each corner, but the ABL mesh reveals that no matter how much manual leveling I try, in an effort to get the four corners and center to more-or-less agree, and it's not quite possible.
ABL permits you to have a perfect virtual bed, even if the real bed is not perfect.
Out of all the upgrades and tweaks I've made to my humble bed-slinger, ABL has been the best bargain.
~≈{👁}≈~
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