Siffer

So I went and bought and Ender5 Pro to learn how to 3d-print stuff.

Unfortunately my bed (the thing you print on) is warped, which leads to bad print results. The printer expects the bed to be without curvature and to have an even distance to the extruder. For me and many other owners of Ender5 (Pro), the stock bed has slightly raised edges (or a lower center).

Most videos and guides for how to deal with this on the internet just says to perform Mesh bed leveling.

Unfortunately the stock firmware is old and does not contain this feature, so we need to build our own. The stock firmware version for me was 1.1.6.3, but I'm building version 2.0.7.2.

I downloaded the 2.0.x sources from this site and decided to do a command-line build with PlatformIO instead of the more common vscode/arduino-studio-alternatives. First I started with arduino studio through Darduino but clicking interfaces blindly is not my style, so I adapted the dockerfile and shell-script for PlatformIO instead. You can find my modified files at the end of this post.

When the docker is built and running, we need to configure the firmware for the board. Download a pair of "standard" Ender5 Pro config files from github and put into the Marlin directory (overwrite/replace the existing Configuration.h and Configuration_adv.h).

Then browse to the Marlin root directory (which contains platformio.ini) and run platformio run -e melzi_optimized to build the firmware. The resulting hex-file can be found in ./.pio/build/melzi_optimized/firmware.hex and is needed for OctoPi.

The OctoPi-plugin needs to be configured with the right programmer and CPU.

FW-plugin-config

Then you just select the hex-file and flash. Wooh!

Before I started hacking with mesh bed leveling configuration, I made sure to verify that this flashed and ran properly.

Then we just have to configure the firmware for our usecase. G29 - Bed Leveling documentation goes into details about different schemes, how to configure them, and how to use them.

I've decided to go for manual bed leveling, with 5x5 measurement points, and LCD menu to help out measurements.

But unfortunately this makes the firmware to large. We need to remove some features to make it small enough for our needs.

Teaching Tech details some thins to turn off in this video about BLTouch in Ender3. Great videos, but I want data easily accessible so I'm listing what can be configured here:

After having flashed this I preheated for PLA(Cause temperature and size) and performed "manual" leveling of the bed, in an attempt to orient the bed before doing mesh leveling.

Then I did a leveling using the LCD and boy is the bed not level!

After storing the settings I ran G29 S0 via OctoPi to get a printout of the measured bed values. This will enable me to quickly restore them, should I need to wipe EEPROM sometime.

Send: G29 S0
Recv: Mesh Bed Leveling OFF
Recv: 5x5 mesh. Z offset: 0.00000
Recv: Measured points:
Recv:         0        1        2        3        4
Recv:  0 -0.07500 -0.12500 -0.12500 -0.12500 -0.02500
Recv:  1 -0.07500 -0.12500 -0.12500 -0.12500 -0.02500
Recv:  2 -0.07500 -0.12500 -0.15000 -0.12500 -0.00000
Recv:  3 -0.05000 -0.15000 -0.17500 -0.15000 -0.02500
Recv:  4 -0.05000 -0.17500 -0.22500 -0.20000 -0.05000
Recv: 
Recv: X:220.00 Y:220.00 Z:0.00 E:0.00 Count X:17600 Y:17600 Z:0
Recv: ok

Ayy lmao no wonder my initial prints didn't look too good.

Dockerfile 
FROM ubuntu:16.04

ENV HOME /home/developer
WORKDIR /home/developer

# Replace 1000 with your user / group id
RUN export uid=1000 gid=1000 && \
    mkdir -p /home/developer && \
    mkdir -p /etc/sudoers.d && \
    echo "developer:x:${uid}:${gid}:Developer,,,:/home/developer:/bin/bash" >> /etc/passwd && \
    echo "developer:x:${uid}:" >> /etc/group && \
    echo "developer ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" > /etc/sudoers.d/developer && \
    chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers.d/developer && \
    chown ${uid}:${gid} -R /home/developer && \
    apt-get update \
    && apt-get install -y \
        software-properties-common 

RUN apt install -y python3-pip python3-tk
RUN pip3 install -U platformio

ENV LC_ALL C.UTF-8
ENV LANG C.UTF-8
ENV DISPLAY :1.0

USER developer


platformio.sh 
#!/bin/bash

docker build -t yolo:yeet . && \
docker run \
    -it \
    --rm \
    -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
    -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    -v /dev:/dev \
    -v $HOME/topics:/topics \
    -v $HOME/topics/platformio:/home/developer/platformio \
    --name platformio \
    yolo:yeet


Other sources:

Teaching Techs guide

Chronological (or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) Category: blog