On a previous video I showed you how to install a 32-bit board
on an ender 3 pro, which also works on an ender 3.
But many people asked what's the advantage? One advantage is you have a lot more
memory for a lot more Marlin features. And one
of the features built into the firmware is mesh bed leveling. And it actually
works a lot better than my method so let me show you mesh
bed leveling on the ender3 pro and today's Filament Friday.
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So what is mesh bed leveling and how does it work? Well it's not a lot
different than auto level. It takes nine measured
points along your bed and then compensates for any variations
so you get a nice smooth first layer. You don't have to install
auto level sensor. You don't have to wire anything up. It's built into the firmware.
So you go into the menu, select mesh bed leveling
and then you manually with paper adjust each point,
using the control knob. So you're selecting the z offset.
Now it seems like a lot more work than letting the auto level do it
but auto level tends to do it every print where this you can do it once,
store the values, and unless you move your printer
or mess the bed up somehow, you can reuse those settings over and over again.
And never have to use the probe. And it saves you installing a probe, installing
wires, any of that stuff. So it's basically free.
So let me show you how to mesh level on this my ender 3 pro.
The skr mini e3 board does give you a different menu.
You have to go to motion and then scroll down to bed leveling
and then we're going to go down to level corners. Now this isn't necessary, this is
just an extra step to get me close. So it's going to go to each corner just
like my bed leveling code. This is getting me
closer so the mesh bed leveling doesn't require a bunch of adjustments.
You don't have to do this but like I
said, it helps. Once this is done, now we're going to go back to the motion
menu. Go to motion, then bed leveling, and then we're gonna click on level bed.
Now this is what launches the mesh bed leveling and the nine
points of measurement. Now we do the same thing with the paper, sliding it
but instead of the knobs underneath the bed, we turn
the knob under the lcd. And it's going to adjust
in .025" adjustments so this is how you set each point.
And then it's going to save that value. I'm going to zoom in so you can see it a
little better. Here I am adjusting the third point
and positive numbers take it higher negative numbers take it lower.
Once it feels good I click and it goes to the next point. And it's going to
continue to do this for all nine points of the bed until
it's got a reading of what this bed looks like. Now
I can test the print. Here's the squares test that I normally do my bed level
test on, and with these settings it came out
really nice. I rub my finger, nothing's popping off, all the corners
look good the only flaw is where i paused it.
So I'm happy with it. So now I go back to motion,
go into the bed leveling menu, and then scroll all the way to the bottom,
store settings. When I click on the button it's going to store those
settings in EEPROM. To test this out, I'm actually
going to print a vase because this gives me a nice base right
in the center to see how smooth it is. You can see it came out pretty smooth
except for one spot so it's a little bit off. Now one thing with mesh bed leveling
I can go back and tweak the knobs if I want after. There's no probe to
erase that. But I'm going to continue with this, let it print
and here's the result. This print came out really nice.
The bottom does have that one flaw that I showed, but the next layer kind of
covered it so overall the bed leveling worked. It stuck to the
bed nicely it's nice and smooth on the bottom.
And the print came out very very nice. Those offsets that are in the mesh bed
level can continue all the way to the top or
you can have those differences slowly fade away
so at the very top of the print it's all at like a zero point. Like it started
with a perfectly level bed. And you can set at what point you want
that to fade away. So a typical number is fade away after
like 20 layers. It'll slowly remove those differences
so you get a nice smooth print all the way to the top and
you can do that with one setting in the LCD. Go back to the motion menu
once again, go into bed leveling and then we're
going to scroll down to fade height. This is where you set the
number of how many layers you want it to fade away. I'm going to
set it to 20. it's a pretty common number a lot of
people use. If you have a smaller print, you can make that smaller for a bigger
print you can go higher whatever you want.
20 works pretty well.
If your machine was shut off and you turn it back on, you want to make sure
you get those settings loaded. Go into the bed leveling menu scroll all
the way down to just above the save settings and there's a load settings.
Click on that, it'll beep and load those settings that were stored in memory.
Normally the start g-code in your slicer will issue a g28
to home the machine before it starts to print but when it does that it actually
clears out any bed level settings. But there is a
setting in marlin that says restore those bed level settings after
the g28. And fortunately the firmware in this
board, I verified has that enabled. So you don't have to do
anything to your start g-code. Just run your normal g-code and it'll
pull the information from where you stored those settings and
you'll get that perfect first layer based on your mesh bed leveling. So
that's mesh bed leveling. I really like it. I should have been
using this a lot sooner. Now some people will ask, could I just do
this on a stock Ender 3? And yes there are videos out there of
people showing you how to install it on an 8-bit board that comes with your
Ender 3, but you're going to have to take some
features off to make room for the mesh bed leveling code
to fit into the firmware. And that takes a little bit of effort.
This one, it comes on the board in the firmware that I loaded in that video
so you're ready to go just by installing the board.
Now the Ender 3 V2 does have a 32-bit board from creality,
not from bigtreetech, and unfortunately the firmware has not advanced far enough
that they've enabled that in the V2 firmware.
So you don't have mesh bed leveling on the stock firmware that comes with it or
even what they have as their latest release.
Now we can add that if we modify the firmware and load it up.
I may do that in a future video. Let me know if you're interested in the
comments below. But for right now if you install this
board on an Ender 3 or Ender 3 pro you have mesh bed leveling with the
latest firmware. If you like this video, maybe check out
some of the other videos that are popping up.
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at Filament Friday.