Auto bed levelling for XXL Printer

Hello everyone,

I m just about to finish a garage size (3.0mx1.5mx1.7m) 3D printer by using most of the electronics from my Prusa i3 and of course slightly bigger mechanics. I want to use the ABL feature (using grid mode) for my big printer as well and now I m thinking about how to do that in the best way because he should not probe the whole print bed (3.0mx1.7m) but just the area where I m going to print.


The two ideas that came in mind are

a) adjusting the probe points in marlin everytime and upload it

b) use variables for the probe points in marlin and set the value in Cura (but I don t know how to do that)


Mhhh so if everyone has some experience with that or some ideas for that - I would be more than happy to talk about them.

All the best


Tom

Another option is:

(c) Use more modern electronics and firmware that lets you configure everything without having to change source code and upload firmware.

That said, I'm not sure which firmwares support grid mode bed compensation. I'll be adding it RepRapFirmware for the the Duet WiFi very soon because it is the third most requested feature of a poll of Duet WiFi users. Bed probing in RepRapFirmware is controlled by a gcode macro file, so it will be possible to set up your own macro files that probe different parts of the bed, and pick one of them from the web interface or the touch screen control panel.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

Pictures or it didn't happen...

Though dc42 is of course a bit biased, he's quite correct. A Smoothie, Duet, Azteeg x5, or clone of any of the above should be able to change its bed-levelling behavior, and any other firmware behavior, on the fly.

Though of course the correct solution is to use a bed that's stiff enough and flat enough that only three points are necessary for levelling...