Hey, folks, Alan Mandic, MandicReally here coming to you
with a new product from Creality.
The CR Touch, their own take on an auto bed leveling sensor.
Is it better than a BL Touch? Let's find out.
Let's get the quick disclosure
out of the way, the folks at Creality did provide this to me free of charge.
However, this is not a sponsored video or anything like that.
This is my own honest opinion about this product.
I'm pretty sure when they sent this to me, they were really expecting
I was going to make like a 30 second Tik Tok video about it and that was that.
Which honestly tells me that they don't know me.
We are going to unbox this thing.
We're going to install it onto one of my Ender 3s
and then we are going to directly compare it to an official BL Touch.
There will be time stamps down below, so you can jump around if you wish.
Now opening up these stylish, magnetically closed box, you will find the CR Touch
itself, a Creality branded magnetic-type, touch auto bed level sensor.
We'll take a closer look at that in a moment,
but it also comes with various brackets for installation on various
Creality machines such as the CR10, Ender 3s, or Ender 5s.
Underneath that,
you'll find a cable to hook up the CR Touch to your main board, as well
as some hardware and the installation instructions that come with it.
I had already unboxed it,
installed and tested it, and reboxed it to unbox it for you folks.
So some of this packaging is a little bit different
than what you will get when you receive it.
The brackets you receive are coated steel construction, press brake bent.
I have no complaints about these as a fabricator myself.
The three things I noticed about the sensor right off the bat.
It's a little bit chunky plastic body design that I kind of like the style of.
Creality branding on there to tell you this is their sensor.
It is a smoked plastic construction to it that harkens back to late
nineties nostalgia for me.
I've kind of been wondering why
that hasn't come back around more lately, and I'm liking seeing it here.
The electrical connection is at the very top of the sensor,
which I like for easy plugging in of your harness connection
and disconnecting if you need to for servicing.
Now the probe that comes with this is actually a metal construction.
I like that versus maybe the plastic probe of the BL Touch,
but we will more directly compare toward the end of this video.
The installation instructions are pretty straightforward.
They are as good, if not better, than I usually expect from Creality on the whole.
So yeah, they could be a little bit better, maybe an Installation video
attached with a QR code here or there.
The biggest thing I was disappointed about
with what came in this box was that there was no SD card.
The instructions
tell you to go to Creality's website to download firmware for this.
I understand this for multiple reasons.
One, they save on an SD card.
Two they will get the most recent firmware, but it's Creality....
Let's face it, the most recent firmware is not THAT recent.
Speaking of which, let's
go ahead and get to the installation, but there is one thing to consider here.
This is intended for use with a 4.2.2 or 4.2.7 Creality mainboard.
Those are the 32 bit main boards from Creality.
Both the non-silent or somewhat silent versus the silent board
that are available for the Ender 3s (5s as well).
I have two Ender 3s and both of them came with 4.2.2 boards
and both of them have been upgraded from there.
These boards have dedicated BL Touch port on them, and also the firmware
we're going to be installing requires that 32-bit processor that those boards have.
The first step for me was installation of the CR Touch onto the mounting bracket.
I did this off of the machine because I found this
to be easier than doing it the other way around.
To install the sensor and bracket onto the machine, we just remove
the two screws that hold the fan shroud around the hot end onto the gantry plate.
Then I actually just use those exact same
two screws, stuck them through the bracket of the CR Touch and then into that
housing once again to reinstall all of it, sandwiching the fan shroud housing
between the CR Touch bracket and the gantry plate.
Next up is wiring I connected the one end connection,
the smaller connector to the CR Touch and then routed it
along with the Bowden Tube and the wiring for the hot end.
Zip tying it along & bundling all of those together.
I did initially try feeding it through the loom and that was just proving
to be a little bit too much of a pain for me.
And I also knew that I wanted to film
this video and might be removing it later on, so I just skipped that in the end.
Next up is connecting this thing to the main board.
first, I have to remove the electronics case cover,
and next is arguably the most difficult step in this entire process.
I have to feed that big connection for the BL Touch to the main board
through the frame into the electronics case
and then plug it into the BL Touch connection.
Which is keyed, so it goes one way. It's very straightforward.
It was just a little bit of a pain to feed it through the frame
and then snake it along
and kind of root it inside of the box nicely, especially since I've got
at least one buck converter in there.
For some of the fan mods that I've made while you're in
the electronics case is an excellent time to remove the Z
Limit switch off of the frame and the wiring associated with it.
The CR Touch is going to be the Z homing switch from now on,
so you no longer need the limit switch
and it will just cause conflicts being there.
Close back up the electronics housing and it's time for firmware.
Now this was my first big hurdle with the CR Touch.
The instructions clearly state to go to Creality's website, download the firmware
and you'll be good to go.
And now myself, as somebody knowing how to go through this process,
that was pretty straightforward. But I went to Creality's website.
I downloaded what seemed to be
the proper firmware for using a CR Touch or a BL Touch.
The firmware knows no difference between the two and does not care.
So I downloaded that, tried to install that and it didn't work out for me.
I was able to flash the firmware just fine, but it was a non-auto
bed leveling firmware, so it did nothing for me.
What I did was I reached out to Creality and asked them, "Hey, what's up here?
I downloaded firmware off of your website. It doesn't seem to be working for me.
Can you provide me with firmware that's going to work for this?"
They sent me a firmware file.
It worked out just fine for me
once I downloaded that and flash that to the main board.
I'm going to go ahead and throw a link in the description down
below to my GitHub page,
and I'm going to upload the firmware that Creality sent to me.
So if you have some trouble with this thing,
you could download that firmware that did work for me and see if it works for you.
OK, it's time to talk about my biggest pet peeve about this entire kit.
These instructions, all of it. Z PROBE OFFSET.
If you've ever set up an automatic bed level sensor,
then you understand that your Z-height, your Z Probe Offset is critical
to the operation of it.
The instructions kind of gloss over doing it.
They have like two or three little blurbs about it and a couple
of really small pictures trying to show you how to do it.
It's awful instructions for a beginner. If somebody didn't know
what they were doing, this would probably turn them off.
The most annoying thing about it is that Marlin firmware has a tool
built into it to help you do this called "Z Offset Wizard".
It works so well it makes the job so much easier,
and it's going to help beginners get the job done far smoother.
Creality could enable this in their firmware,
but the firmware they provided to me was from 4/20 of 2020.
So it's over one year old at this point, and I don't even know
that it could enable this function if they wanted to.
When I compile the firmware for the testing, we're about to get into,
then I enabled this function and it worked just fine on this machine.
When we put the BL Touch side by side
with the CR Touch, we can see that it's not just another knock off BL Touch.
I thought maybe it was a BL Touch inside of different clothing,
but the more I look at it, the less I think that's actually the case.
Maybe it's the same core technology, but overall it is a different product.
By the way, there's a link in the description
down below to a blog post on my website, which has photos of the inside
of this macro photos.
You can take a look at what's going on inside of the CR Touch sensor.
Now, obviously, the CR Touch was designed
to work in places where the BL Touch was previously.
It has the same bolt pattern, the same spacing for the bolt pattern,
so that it can work right on the mounts that would have accepted the BL
Touch previously.
However, in most other ways, it's different.
You've got that metal probe that I discussed on there
instead of the plastic one.
While the BL Touch has a replaceable plastic probe,
the CR Touch has a non-replaceable metal probe.
So if you had a catastrophic crash, maybe you could bend that probe
and it might screw up the CR Touch and ruin it.
But that would have to be a pretty catastrophic crash.
The connector on both of these is the same.
You can directly replace a BL Touch with a CR Touch and vice versa,
which is what I did for my testing.
I personally like that the connector for the CR Touche is at the back
where the mounting flange is.
I feel like that makes the wiring just a little bit easier.
I've designed some custom situations for BL Touches in the past where it's
difficult to get in there and make the connections
he almost has to make it
before you bolt thing together, and that can be another challenge in itself.
However, the CR Touch is bigger in every way and heavier.
The CR Touch measures a little over half of the MM shorter than the BL Touch,
which could be useful in some situations,
but does mean that if you're switching from one to the other,
you're going to need to adjust your Z Probe Offset, which you should be doing,
even if you're replacing a BL Touch with the BL Touch.
However, the CR Touch is a little chunkier.
It is 16 mm by 16 mm approximately wide.
Whereas the BL Touch is about 13 mm by 14
mm, so it is a little slimmer to fit into different situations.
And the last detail that might be the biggest one
to some of you folks out there, though granted,
if you're doing like speed Benchy runs you're probably not running an ABL at all.
Anyway, that is weight.
CR Rouch weighs in on my scale at 11
grams, whereas this BL Touch weighs in at 7 grams.
Now it's time to discuss testing as the "Mad Scientist of All Trades" well,
I went ahead and tested them head to head, back to back with some scientific data.
OK, it's not necessarily the scientific method, as I only had one CR Touch and one
BL Touch to test against each other, on one machine.
I could absolutely get more scientific about this, but for what
I have at my disposal right now, this is what we did.
The first test that I ran is one built into Marlin and it's called the M48.
An M48 is a repeatability test that test the sensor over and over again.
It probes over, over, over and over again, and as it does, it averages
all of the readings that it gets to see how accurate the sensor is to itself.
It does this many times, and I then ran the M48, 6 times.
Overall, I took those numbers and I averaged all 6 of those results.
And that is what you're seeing on the graph here.
And in my testing of all those probes, the CR
Touch was actually more accurate than the BL Touch.
Not by a wide margin, but it was.
And the thing about that is that, according to Creality's website,
they only rate the CR touch at .04 mm accuracy.
I was getting results well above that, so I'm pretty impressed in that regard.
Now, for more of a real world test, I visualize the bed on the industry
with these 2 sensors.
Now, many of us understand the beds on Ender 3s are often warped
and mine are no exception.
And that's one of the ways that an ABL can really help you out
is figuring that warp into your first layer of your print.
So I ran each of
centers through two visualization tests, and I'm putting the results up here now.
These are 6 by 6 grid tests on the same bed, on the same machine.
Only difference being the Z Probe Offset and the sensor actually doing the testing.
I'm not really sure what this is telling you.
The visualization is slightly different between these two sensors,
which one is more accurate.
I cannot say. By the repeatability test, I might want to trust the CR
Touch a little bit better here, but this is a comparison.
I just wanted to see
if the results are going to wildly vary between the two of them
in a real world situation, and they did not.
All right. Testing done its conclusion time.
What do I really think of the CR Rouch when compared to a BL Touch?
Honestly, overall
I was far more impressed with them than I thought it was going to be.
I expected when they sent to me it was just going to be
a little BL Touch clone and maybe a lesser quality one.
But I've actually found, I think, the opposite.
I think it's actually, in my opinion, a slightly better
variation on it or an interesting twist on the BL Touch.
Now on Creality's website the kit that I showed you here for the CR
Touch is going for $49.99.
The equivalent BL Touch kit with the same brackets and wiring
and all of that coming in it, the kit is $48.99 on their website.
So you're paying a dollar more for the slightly sleeker looking CR Touch.
But if you jumped over to Amazon, there's a six dollar off coupon right now
on the $48.99 kit for the BL Touch, you can get it for $42.99.
Hey, folks, editing Alan here, just chiming in real quick.
I want to make a quick statement in this video.
I first off field, I came off a little harsher
than I intended to about my critiques of the kit,
but they are also critiques that I feel are valid.
But with that, the folks at Creality did reach out while I was editing this video
and specifically ask for input about the kit and ways that they could improve it.
So I did provide that to them.
I told them what problems I had with it and what I would like to see.
This did come to me before release, so there is the potential
that they will update this kit before you ever receive it.
I do not know, but I just want to throw that
in their little addendum and be fair to them
because they are asking for input, whether they implement it or not
I do not know, but hopefully they do. Back to the video.
There will be links and description down below to both of these products.
So if you're interested in picking one up, if you can make a decision
on which one's right for you, well, they are down there.
Those are both affiliate links.
So if you do use them, I do get a small kickback for you using them,
but it doesn't cost you anything more, so please consider using them.
I personally am going to leave the CR Touch on the Ender
3 that it's installed on right now.
I like it. I like the look of it.
It fits the machine well. It works well.
I'm going to leave it.
I wish that Creality would update their instructions and their firmware
more often, but this kit overall is as good as a BL Touch kit absolutely.
If not, maybe a little bit better. And that's it for this one, folks.
If you found this video interesting, please drop it a LIKE.
let me know in the COMMENTS down below, "What did you think of the CR Touch
compared to the BL Touch?" Are you going to
change out your BL Touches for CR Touches or do you just not care?
Let me know in the comments down below.
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And thanks for coming around, folks!