Hi,
just wanted to share an idea with you that I had recently.
It’s about an extension of the controller board that allows to connect up to 3 z-motors that are synchronized during normal operation, but controlled individually during z-homing to achieve real bed-leveling.
I know I’m not really good in making those videos.
Nevertheless I hope you found the idea at least interesting or helpfull.
It could work. a bit.
The problem with this system is that when the first endstop is triggered, the travel of the second and third motor will throw the first slightly of. This effect can be reduced by repeating the leveling process a couple of times, each time reducing the fault.
I never liked the idea of constantly leveling the bed, but it has the advantage that it can detect a crooked building platform, and adjust accordingly.
This system can’t.
Having said that, I would like to try this sometime, as it is a automated version of what I do with my printer by hand. I already have the three separate stepper motors, so it would be easy to install.
@Rien_Stouten I disaggree:
The second and third can only throw the first off if either…
A) the linear actuater has significant backlash (which with areasonable design is not neccessarily the case) …or…
B) the trigger point of the deticated endstop is sigificantly far away from the point where the lifting force is applyed, so that the tilding caused by the alignment will cause measurable change in height (again, depends on the rest of the design and is not neccessarily the case)
Furthermore the z-homing has already a two pass aproach where after a first fast approach the axis is slightly retracted and slowly approached a second time for the last few millimeters. The described leveling feature will automatically apply in both passes which will reduce any failure significantly.
For a system like this, I’d probably forego microstepping completely as well - that way the system could be powered off instead of powering 3(!) motors at all times.