auto bed leveling

9 Articles

A 3D printer is in the process of printing a test piece. The printer has two horizontal linear rails at right angles to each other, with cylindrical metal rods mounted horizontally on the rails, so that the rods cross over the print bed. The print head slides along these rods.

An Open-Concept 3D Printer Using Cantilever Arms

July 12, 2025 by 13 Comments

If you’re looking for a more open, unenclosed 3D printer design than a cubic frame can accommodate, but don’t want to use a bed-slinger, you don’t have many options. [Boothy Builds] recently found himself in this situation, so he designed the Hi5, a printer that holds its hotend between two cantilevered arms.

The hotend uses bearings to slide along the metal arms, which themselves run along linear rails. The most difficult part of the design was creating the coupling between the guides that slides along the arms. It had to be rigid enough to position the hotend accurately and repeatably, but also flexible enough avoid binding. The current design uses springs to tension the bearings, though [Boothy Builds] eventually intends to find a more elegant solution. Three independent rails support the print bed, which lets the printer make small alterations to the bed’s tilt, automatically tramming it. Earlier iterations used CNC-milled bed supports, but [Boothy Builds] found that 3D printed plastic supports did a better job of damping out vibrations.

[Boothy Builds] notes that the current design puts the X and Y belts under considerable load, which sometimes causes them to slip, leading to occasional layer shifts and noise in the print. He acknowledges that the design still has room for improvement, but the design seems quite promising to us.

This printer’s use of cantilevered arms to support the print head puts it in good company with another interesting printer we’ve seen. Of course, that design element does also lend itself to the very cheapest of printers.

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Fast Scanning Bed Leveling

April 6, 2023 by 29 Comments

The bane of 3D printing is what people commonly call bed leveling. The name is a bit of a misnomer since you aren’t actually getting the bed level but making the bed and the print head parallel. Many modern printers probe the bed at different points using their own nozzle, a contact probe, or a non-contact probe and develop a model of where the bed is at various points. It then moves the head up and down to maintain a constant distance between the head and the bed, so you don’t have to fix any irregularities. [YGK3D] shows off the Beacon surface scanner, which is technically a non-contact probe, to do this, but it is very different from the normal inductive or capacitive probes, as you can see in the video below. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see it print because [YGK3D] mounted it too low to get the nozzle down on the bed. However, it did scan the bed, and you can learn a lot about how the device works in the video. If you want to see one actually printing, watch the second, very purple video from [Dre Duvenage].

Generally, the issues with probes are making them repeatable, able to sense the bed, and the speed of probing all the points on the bed. If your bed is relatively flat, you might get away with probing only 3 points so you can understand how the bed is tilted. That won’t help you if your bed has bumps and valleys or even just twists in it. So most people will probe a grid of points.

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3D Printer Z Sensor Claims 0.01 Mm Resolution

November 14, 2022 by 54 Comments

Early 3D printers usually had a microswitch that let you know when the Z axis was at the zero point. There was usually an adjustment screw so you could tune for just the right layer height. But these days, you most often see some sort of sensor. There are inductive sensors that work with a metal bed and a few other styles, as well. However, the most common is the “BL touch” style sensor that drops a probe below the nozzle level, measures, and then retracts the probe. However, nearly all of these sensors work by detecting a certain height over the bed and that’s it.

A new probe called BDsensor is inductive but can read the height over the bed in real time. According to information from the developer, it achieves a resolution of 0.01 mm and a repeatability of +/- 0.005mm. We don’t know if that’s true or not, but being able to take real-time soundings of the nozzle height leads to some interesting possibilities such as real-time adjustments of Z height, as seen in the video below.

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Homemade Probe For 3D Printer: $3

February 11, 2022 by 38 Comments

You have a few choices if you want to use a probe to level your 3D printer bed. Rarely, you’ll see optical or capacitive probes. More commonly, though, your probe will sense a metal print or uses a physical probe to touch the print bed. [Design Prototype Test] has long used a BLTouch which uses the latter method. However, putting it in a heated build chamber prevented it from working so he set out to make his own simple design using an Allen key.

We’ve seen Allen key sensors before, but usually, they use a microswitch. We’ve also seen microswitches used to directly probe the bed. But, in this case, a 3D printed fan shroud uses an optical sensor to note when the Allen key hits the bed.

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Manual Mesh Bed Levelling For 3D Printers

December 1, 2019 by 18 Comments

In 3D printing, we often talk about leveling the print bed, although that’s not an accurate term. A bed that is level in our terms presents a flat surface that is parallel to the path of the print head, but within reason we care little about that. Instead we care more about it being parallel to the path of the head than it being perfectly flat. If we had a perfectly flat bed — say a sheet of glass — you’d think it might be pretty easy, but for some other materials it could be convex or concave or even have ripples all over the place. [Teaching Tech] shows you how to manually “level” the bed using a mesh but without using an automatic sensor. You can see the technique in the video below.

When you use adjustments to level the bed, you are tramming it, but only the very pedantic use that term for fine adjustment. But no amount of adjusting bed springs will get rid of bulges and ripples. A common solution is to use a sensor to measure the distance to the bed and form a mesh correction. Then, as the printer head moves in the XY plane, the software will adjust the Z-axis to rise over bumps and go down if there is a concave portion of the bed. What [Teaching Tech] is doing, however, is a manual mapping. You won’t need to add a sensor to your printer to take advantage of the method. 

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Sonic 3D Printer Auto Bed Leveling Makes A Swoosh

July 18, 2016 by 49 Comments

3D Printering: the final frontier. These are the voyages of another 3D printer hack. Its mission: to explore strange new ways of leveling a print bed.

So far, we’ve had servo probes, Allen key probes, Z-sled probes, inductive and capacitive contactless switches, just to name a few. All of them allow a 3D printer to probe its print bed, calculate a correction plane or mesh, and compensate for its own inherent, time variant, inaccuracies.

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Rethinking Automated Bed Leveling For 3D Printers

February 22, 2016 by 38 Comments

Automatic bed leveling is the next killer feature that will be found on all commercial filament printers. It’s a problem that has been solved a few dozen times already; there are just so many ways you can go about it. The Printrbot uses an inductive sensor to determine the position of the metal bed in relation to the nozzle. The Lulzbot Mini touches the nozzle itself to four contacts on the corner of the bed. There are even a few projects that will mechanically level the bed with the help of a system of cams and springs. It’s a difficult problem, and none of these solutions are perfect. [mjrice] has been thinking about the problem, and he hit upon a solution that is simple, elegant, and can be replicated on a 3D printer. It’s the RepRap solution to 3D printing, and it looks cool, to boot.

Instead of using the nozzle as a contact, getting an inductive sensor, or fabricating a baroque system of gears and cams, [mjrice] is doing this the old-fashioned way: a simple microswitch, the same type of switch you would find on the limit switches of any RepRap. Having a switch at the same Z position as a nozzle is an iffy idea, so [mjrice] made this switch retract into the extruder during printing, without using any motors, servos, or other electromechanical contrivances.

The key to this setup is a simple spring and a rack gear. When this rack gear is hit from the left side, it moves an arm and places the switch down on the bed. Hit the rack from the right side, and the switch folds up into the extruder. Combine this with a bit of G-code at the beginning of the print, and the switch will move down, figure out the actual height of the bed, and flip up out of the way. Beautiful, elegant, and the algorithms for bed leveling are already in most major printer firmwares.

You can check out the video of the mechanism below. It’s a great little device, and since it’s on a RepRap first, it’s not going to show up in a proprietary 3D printer next.

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