I will look forward to trying this out, my plan, rightly or wrongly, will be to have a metallic bed base, and a probe ( A fixed pin with a connection back to the Ramps board) on the moving platform that will be a substitue for the hot end, and then I can probe to my heart's content across the surface of the print area, get it aligned correctly, and then get the appropriate correction factors from as many or as few places as I care to use across the entire print area.
As for the math to then work out that correction factor that will be needed in the software, I suspect that's where I will be looking for some pointers or guidance on how to put them into the code so that it works correctly.
Then, I mount the hot end, and the heated bed and the relevant cover glass plate, or whatever, and then move the head down from a known position above the bed, until I can't move a feeler gauge of my desired nozzle print height that is between the nozzle and the bed, and the offset from the originally calculated z height becomes my new z height, and in theory, I have a perfectly calibrated printer. assuming that the hot bed, and plate are a uniform thickness, which will have to be checked before making assumptions that could be misleading. I may then need to check it with different bed heat temperatures, to allow for differences due to the heat, which I've not seen mentioned previously, and I don't know if it's significant,
in theory, it would then be possible to make up and mount an optical switch based sensor that could be used to check things out on an ongoing basis, but that needs some thought
Am I barking up the wrong tree here, or is this the best way to get perfect bed alignment that can also compensate for bed thickness variances with temperature?
Thanks
Steve
As for the math to then work out that correction factor that will be needed in the software, I suspect that's where I will be looking for some pointers or guidance on how to put them into the code so that it works correctly.
Then, I mount the hot end, and the heated bed and the relevant cover glass plate, or whatever, and then move the head down from a known position above the bed, until I can't move a feeler gauge of my desired nozzle print height that is between the nozzle and the bed, and the offset from the originally calculated z height becomes my new z height, and in theory, I have a perfectly calibrated printer. assuming that the hot bed, and plate are a uniform thickness, which will have to be checked before making assumptions that could be misleading. I may then need to check it with different bed heat temperatures, to allow for differences due to the heat, which I've not seen mentioned previously, and I don't know if it's significant,
in theory, it would then be possible to make up and mount an optical switch based sensor that could be used to check things out on an ongoing basis, but that needs some thought
Am I barking up the wrong tree here, or is this the best way to get perfect bed alignment that can also compensate for bed thickness variances with temperature?
Thanks
Steve