On today's episode I'm going to show you how to install mesh bed leveling
on your ender3 v2 right here at Filament Friday.
Filament Friday is brought to you every week by the generous donations of these Patreon
supporters. I've got 2 Ender 3 v2s and this one just never seems to level right for me. So I want
to install mesh bed leveling. To install mesh bed leveling you have to update your firmware
and this firmware site has been recommended to me by numerous viewers. I'll put a link to it in the
description below. I see why this is recommended, there's a lot here including default files for
the 4.2.2 and 4.2.7 board. There's a lot of different bl touch versions that you can download.
There's also the universal bed level which is relatively new. I'm still learning this.
And there's source code included which is really nice. But in this video I'm going to install the
5x5 manual mesh. I'm going to install this on my Ender3 v2 which has a 32-bit version 4.2.2 board.
To install this, download the dot bin file onto a blank 8 gigabyte SD card. Then just turn power off
to your machine, insert the SD card into the SD card slot, and then turn on power. And the machine
will reboot you'll get a blank screen and then the Creality screen will come up. And you should
notice that the info box is replaced by the new level menu. Info is now moved to the control menu,
all the way at the bottom. You click on that and you can verify that you've updated the firmware.
To prepare the machine I cleaned the bed with some soapy water and then wiped it off with a dry
paper towel. And then I cleaned the nozzle to make sure there was no filament sticking out that would
cause me bad readings. Under the new prepare menu there's a manual leveling option and this levels
above the adjustment knobs just like I normally do and I showed in my previous bed leveling video.
So I ran that just to get everything close. I ran each corner but then when I got to the center,
it was off. So this bed is slightly warped. I'm hoping mesh bed leveling will fix that. Now we
go to the level menu and this is the mesh bed leveling. First, it homes the machine and then
it'll go to that first point. So it homes it and then it says it's going to go to the first point.
And that's right in the corner not above the knob, just in the corner. This is five by five.
And then there's a micro-step up and down. I'm going to use the micro-step down. If you hold it,
it'll go down from the starting position of 0.20 so all I did was rub the paper
and hold down the knob until it started to grab. And then I clicked on the next point
and I just repeated the same steps. I scrolled down to the micro step down,
I held the button until the paper rubbed, and then I stopped and then clicked on the next point.
So basically I did this across the whole bed. There's 25 points because it's five by five. So it
got a reading at each point. When it was done then I clicked on save mesh and it saves those values
to the memory on the control board. To use those values at the start of a print I'm going to change
my start g code so I'll go to manage printers within Cura machine settings and then after the
g28 home I put an m420 space s1. That loads the mesh bed level before the print starts. After I
did that I remembered that they offered the source code. So I downloaded the source code and went to
the mesh level and found the configuration dot h and proved that they had defined the restore level
after g28. So after g28 home it automatically restores the leveling. So I didn't have to use
that m420 command. I don't think it hurts anything but I didn't have to do it. And I loaded in my
basic squares that I used to test bed leveling and this will just go around only one level and
I'll stop it. And here's the results. This is one of the best test prints I've ever gotten.
In a previous video, I showed a plugin for Cura that gives you a list of test prints. And one
of them is a bed level calibration print and it's a series of squares that are connected by
lines which are actually squares so it starts out drawing these fine squares and then it forms these
smaller squares which get filled in. So I figured I'd run this test print now as it was going down.
I could see there were a few spots the filament wasn't sticking as well as I'd like. And it was
on the outer edges like here at the front it was lifting. Back in the corner it was not sticking
real well. There's a little bit of lifting here on this one pad but other than that it wasn't
too bad, but certainly not perfect. But the center was better than I was getting before.
It may not be perfect but this mesh bed leveling definitely improved the results
on this particular v2. Creality did send me one of their bl touch auto leveling kits and
it's on sale right now for 39.99. And then I'll try out the software for the bl touch and see
if that makes it even better. If you want to see that let me know in the comments below. If you
like what I'm doing here maybe check out some of the other videos popping up. And if nothing
else click on the CHEP logo and subscribe. I'll see you next time right here at Filament Friday.