You Can Now Get 10,000 Points When Mesh Leveling Your 3D Printer Bed

The first layer of 3D printing is the most crucial. A print that isn’t good on the first layer will most likely fail. If the layer is good, it will most likely succeed unless your slicer settings are very poor. Modern 3D printers use mesh bed leveling to determine the flatness of the bed. This allows them to compensate for tilt or warping to create a good first layer. While traditional mesh bed leveling hardware can probe between five and 25 points at a time, it is not as accurate as modern technology. The new Beacon Surface scanner gives you 10,000 points to get better results.

These extra points allow the printer to see the bed’s true shape. There is no perfect bed, and even the best beds can have variations. The difference between the nozzle’s point and the bed can cause a variation in the first layer. The mesh bed leveling allows the printer tilt the bed or adjust the Z axis while a layer is being printed. Or both. The printer won’t be able adjust for bed variations if it only examines nine points. The printer can compensate by obtaining high-resolution height maps of the bed by collecting data on 10,000 points.

It would take around 8 hours to probe 10,000 points using a standard probe. The Beacon Surface Scanner, however, can scan all those points more quickly than a standard probe can. It can also check 16 points per second. Because it scans the entire bed continuously, and does not need to stop at any point, it is extremely efficient. Because it emits magnetic fields and senses magnetic eddies in the bed, this is how it works. These eddies are dependent on the distance between the Beacon (and the bed) It only checks the area and not individual points. This means it can detect variations while it moves across a bed without stopping. The controller of the printer processes the sensor readings to create a height map.