BL Touch upgrade for HSBNE printers

Teams Digital Fabrication
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Hi Folks,

As my recent purchase proposal for some BL Touch units was approved, I’ve just ordered them. Apparently they’re on sale so I could actually get 5 for the price of 4 meaning we can have one spare for parts/to swap out as needed.

They’re coming from China so I expect them to take 1-2 months to arrive. Once they do I’ll setup the printers with new firmware that supports the BL Touch units and add them to each printer.

This will make it way easier for us to keep the print beds level as it can be done automatically in software! It will also mean the z offset will get calibrated each and every time a print starts which will improve consistency with bed adhesion.

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These have just arrived. I’ll be in on the weekend to install one on the left CR-10 and possibly the CR-X machines if I get time.

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Would it be possible to prep the bltouch for cr10-right as well? I know it’s missing a fan and the control board is SD only right now.

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I’ll try to if I get time. Will put it at the lower end of my priority list though :slightly_smiling_face:.

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@jabelone - Did you want a hand?

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I’ll be in some time tomorrow afternoon so if you’re around that would be great! :slightly_smiling_face:

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Cool beans - will be free after 14.30, so I’ll head over. :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Thanks to @Giuliku for helping me install the BL Touch sensors on the CR-10 machines yesterday.

The firmware proved pretty tricky to get working as the mainboards are so old they only have a very small amount of progmem available which made using Marlin 2.0 or TH3D’s firmware difficult to say the least.

I spent most of today trying different options in TH3D’s firmware then went back to stock Marlin as I just couldn’t get it down small enough. I finally got a build of Marlin 2.0 under 130kb with the unified bed leveling feature that allows for automatic mesh bed leveling. However, I had to disable SD card support for this. Seeing as our printers should all be used via Octoprint, this shouldn’t be a problem.

I would much prefer this over Creality’s provided firmware as it’s very out of date and makes it more difficult to maintain machines that are all running different firmwares. I got the Left CR-10 set back up again and the auto leveling working, however the thermistors seemed to be reading strange values so I may have to change the build settings.

On Tuesday I intend on sorting this out and getting the left CR-10 back to a fully operational status complete with automatic mesh bed leveling. I’ve also bought the SD cards for the new Raspberry Pis and will set them up some time in the next few days.

I wanted to have all the BL Touch sensors sorted a while ago but the installation has proven much more tricky than I thought. I also added a custom boot screen with the HSBNE logo to the firmware build.