Yes the Octoprint plugin just sends an M420 V and then displays the plot. I’m just trying to get the bed as level as possible because I have zero faith in the mesh level any longer due to backlash, bed rocking front to back and the waves in my original print sheet/bed heater/bed frame.
Starting point 3x3 auto level and brand new never heated print sheet
I think part of the problem is that the software routine use to interpolate a surface over the mesh points isn’t an accurate representation of the actual shape of the surface. It’s designed to make a smooth surface over the points, The surface may not be smooth. If you had a 100 x 100 matrix it might get close. The more a single point is away from being accurate the more it creates a wave of inaccuracy around that point.
Maybe what is needed is a routine that tries to move the points to a plane that gives you a minimum of the mean distance away from the plane. No, because it’s not necessarily a plane. It’s bent and warped by the frame.
Of course that is still in combination with the heat changing things, and the play, and the backlash. Perhaps those all need to be addressed individually. Tightening up the carriage can help the play, a glass-composite bed could help the heat movement, backlash compensation can be done in the software. The reading on the bed is all biased by those three things.
Thanks for thinking of me but that won’t work on the SM2 because the heated bed is bolted directly to the cast aluminum carrier plate. It would be possible but not without losing 20mm of Z travel or so. There is currently no way around the manual or automatic leveling when it runs. The head dives to about 12mm iirc and that would be below the bed surface.
All I had time to do last night and as you can see a 3x3 mesh is insufficient for the A350. This is after my manually getting the bed as mechanically flat as possible, running the 3x3 mesh, tweaking said mesh with check level hot routine and then kicking off the print with a 0.2mm first layer.
Big track of filament in the upper left corner is from me trying to bump the nozzle up 0.1mm from the touchscreen control. Same for both thin diagonal lines closer to the center.
Question on how you’re printing the test web, what speed you using?
I always use a .3 first layer to help it adhere. It can accommodate in those places the nozzle is too close.
20mm/s speed and I tried a .32 layer earlier and even a .5 layer with a .8 nozzle. Yes the larger layers help but that is not the point of my exercise. A modern printer should be able to easily crank out a .2 layer print. I can print 50 micron layers on a few of my other printers so a 200 micron print should be easy in my book. I know the team is working the issue but I get impatient at times.
Yeah me too. That’s why I had switched to a 0.8mm nozzle so I could print a big first layer but of course all detail is lost unless I was just printing a box or cube.
