When makers new to 3D printing begin their journey most of the YT channels encourage new 3D printers to purchase a BLTouch for automatic bed leveling on consumer grade printers like the Ender 3v2 I'm playing with this month.
My experience over the years is that when we want to truly master something new, we should learn to do it manually before we move to full automation. For the past 27 days I have manually leveled the print bed on my Ender 3v2 with only a piece of paper and the wheels and springs below the print bed. This process gave me a good feel for print bed leveling.
Yesterday, I installed new Jyers firmware, discussed here, Day 28: Adventures in 3D Printing for Beginners - Ender 3v2 Jyers Firmware Upgrade
Today, fully confident with firmware upgrades, I decided to install a version of Jyers firmware setup for manually bed leveling without a BLTouch z-probe with Unified Bed Leveling (UBL). This method creates software mesh so we can stop manually adjusting bed leveling wheels. I installed the 3x3 UBL No-Probe version of Jyers so I could manually level with 9 points instead of 25 points required by a 5x5 test grid. I think this is OK because the Ender 3v2 print bed is not very large (220 x 220 mm).
I also added the OctoPrint Bed Level Visualizer for fun.
We can also see the leveling mesh we create in the printer LCD, so adding the OctoPrinter plugin above seemed more aesthetic than super functional. This makes sense since the plugin is a "visualizer" and not a "controller".
To make a somewhat long story short, I manually ran a mesh without performing any software z-leveling and got a perfect mesh visualization since all the z-offsets were zero. This is expected, of course.
Then, I ran the firmware leveling method in the UI and manually adjusted the z-offsets using Jyers firmware adjustments in the LCD UI for all nine mesh points and came up with the mesh below. As expected the bed was already quite level and there was no warping. This seems reasonable for a leveling bed with strong upgraded springs on a printer only a month old printing mostly at bed temps of 60 degrees C (PLA+ and PLA-F).
Afterwards, I ran some small test prints with skirts and adjusted the overall z-offset for the extruder nozzle and starting printing again.
I am not sure when I will install the BLTouch I purchased a month ago when I first bought my Ender 3v2. I still want to play around with manual UBL without a z-probe ( no BLTouch) and get a deeper understanding of using a software mesh to compensate for bed leveling versus using manual adjustment wheels.
One of the first things I did notice, however, was it is must easier to fine tune the bed leveling using micro-steps in firmware versus manually turning leveling wheels under the print bed. So far, this is the only benefit I have found; better leveling granularity because adjusting in software is much easier than fiddling around with a large manual thumb-type wheel.
Let's see if I can find any other benefits of this setup, or issues with this method, before installing the BLTouch still in the box, on my shelf, from the merchant.
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