OK people, so this has been banging around my head for a bit and

3D Printing
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1

OK people, so this has been banging around my head for a bit and I don’t know if its a stupid idea or not.
So I’m thinking about homing z, the extruder nozzle is generally made of brass, right, so if we had a metal pad on the bed, when were homing z we send the head down to this contact point and when the nozzle makes an electrical connection to this pad (which would have to be the same height as the bed, granted) the signal is the endstop switch signal. Its not a switch roughly in the right place, its a true feedback of the nozzles current z position.

This has probably been tried before, or there’s a really simple reason I haven’t thought of for why it wouldn’t work…

Thoughts?

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Crud on the nozzle could stop contacts from happening. Thus it will over torque and break stuff.

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Using electrical contact for levelling is used already but as the previous poster said, crud on the nozzle matters. Lulzbot printers use this method but they scrub the nozzle clean before levelling to make sure no crud is on the nozzle.

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Course, and you would need a failover in case the scrub didn’t succeed… Thank you guys, that’s been bugging me :slight_smile:

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Look at lulzbot taz printers. @Thomas_Sanladerer has some awesome reviews on them. It shows how they clean it and use it.

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The zotrax m200 does this too ( only a few points tho not an actual calibration ) we had a damaged bed ( from removing prints ) so it couldn’t detect the touch and it burnt a nice big dent into the bed…

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@Adrian_Ciubotariu that’s another issue. If you coat your bed for adhesion (blue tape, poly tape, etc) then it will insulate against connection, unless you leave holes in the coverage.

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Here’s my effort from 2011…

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@Adrian_Ciubotariu ha-ha sorry I didn’t mean to be condescending! :joy:

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@Francis_Lee I was hoping the emoticon helped with not making it sound rude :))) it’s all good! :)))

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the head always have some filament left after printing , this stop conductions occur, there must be some cleaning work todo before using this technique, and heated up also. so things became complex after all this.

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I have designed (not yet tested though) a probe that helps having a more compact setup in the sense that it doesn’t need a conductive bed/foil, doesn’t need current going through the nozzle (if there is some sort of short that lets that current go to the controller via an uninsulated cartrige wire or smth similar you can damage the controller) and some more. It looks like this: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1335303