BLTouch & Clones Thoughts

I had a thought of all of us here with a BLTouch or clone I seem to the the one having the most problems with it. First on my Ender 3 v2 even after following the suggestions of a shielded cable & grounding it. Now with the 3D Touch on the SV04.

First my laptop is sitting on the same desk with the printer in both cases and on the same side as the wiring harness with the BLT leads.

Second the room the printers are in is rather small and the main electric panel is in the same room. Maybe 6 ft away.

Can’t do much about the electric panel other than maybe try covering it with aluminum foil. I’m going to try moving the laptop to another location and see if that makes a difference.

Turning the heaters off while probing, and maybe putting the printer in a shielded enclosure, would likely help. The documentation for Klipper strongly recommends probing with cold hotends and printbeds, so that would be an easy test.

I recently installed a BL Touch. After reading about the issues of the probing not working I took a suggestion to disable the heaters during probing. I’ve done a few dozen prints since installing the BL Touch and have not encountered any problems. The BL Touch has sure made my printing life easier. Manually tramming the bed was a real pain in the rear as I needed to do it after every print or I’d end up with the next job ot sticking to the plate. I use a Creality glass bed. If I’m patient and let it cool to ambient room temp it literally falls off the glass

I lack the patience. I heat it off much faster. My peinter bed takes far too long to cool for me to accept that way of getting my prints unstuck.

I’m OK waiting for the bed to cool. It gives me a tiny sense of excitement every time I go to the printer and just pick the model right off the printbed.

I moved the laptop to the other side of the room. Did a couple of homing sequences on the SV04 with everything cold. That worked so I heated the bed to 60c where I normally print. Home again, another success did this several times with the same results. Okay it now time to see if it will print, graded a model and sliced it in Ideamaker and threw it on the printer. It went through homing just fine and started printing. When that one finished I threw another one on and it also printed.

That sure beats yesterday when it wouldn’t home at all. Found this video on how to fix some of the issues on a 3DTouch but I’m guessing it would apply to BLTouch too. It does for the most part require compelling the code.