The Future of 3D Printer Bed Levelling - 10,000 Point Mesh with Beacon Surface Scanner

The Beacon Surface Scanner is a novel new device that scans your 3D printer bed rather than probing it. This allows for incredibly dense bed meshes in a fraction of the time as compared to traditional inductive or mechanical bed probes. In this video I illustrate the operational principle of the Beacon and set it up on my RatRig V-Core 3.

[alonraz]

Although very technologically impressive, I think the mounting difficultys, the compatibility issues and the need for klipper and pi could mean beacon will take a while to catch on, but I think it definitely has a place in the future of printing

[collectd]

Thanks for the credit on the clip! Also very nice job on putting this video together! One of the things im really excited about is the live Z readout. I hope the feature becomes available where you can set the sensor over a corner and live adjust your bed corners. From what I understand this is possible, just the UI needs to be built out for it. Having a live readout would make leveling the corners of my bed very convenient.

[pizzablender]

This really is like an inductive Z probe, but with analogue output. Calibrate it once by comparing signal levels to know Z heights and off you go.
Also has disadvantages of inductive probes, such as not working of a glass print surface. And I wonder how the deviation would be between hot and cold print surfaces.

[Beansswtf]

6:47 Turns head over to my springs and levelling knobs 😢

[daniladergachev]

it has the same issue as an inductive probe. It measured the metal under the print surface. BLTouch and TAP measure the surface itself.

[sasca]

I think Beacon is a very cool product, but it's ultimately just a really fast inductive probe. And the speed is a little superfluous IMO. You can quickly construct a super high resolution mesh... of the metal _underneath_ of your actual print surface. That's of limited use for bed meshing IMO, although it's fine for tramming if your printer supports that. I would rather use a mechanical probe (or any type of surface-detecting probe) and combine it with adaptive meshing (IE, only probing the area that you're printing in). The resolution is more than sufficient, and you get a mesh more representative of your actual print surface. Plus it means you don't need to redo your Z offset when you change build plates. With something like Klicky, you can combine it with a physical Z endstop to even handle nozzle change offsets automatically. Or toss the physical Z endstop and just run something like Voron Tap or Prusa's loadcell system and never worry about anything ever again because your nozzle IS your probe =)

[serkancebeci]

hi, fixes large platter issues very well 👏, The mesh feature has been further elaborated andI think you mean that if the mesh feature is further detailed and a few more things are added, such as camera, it will perform both part scanning and 3d printing.

[danielhuman]

Something like this has me wondering if the same kind of result with another technology is possible ... One that doesn't rely on the bed being a specific material. Something like sonar or something ... This technology is awesome, the continuous improvement and innovation of 3D printing tech is mind-blowing

[xavierlipscomb]

leave it to 3d printing community to take something as simple as bed leveling and over engineer the absolute shit out of it. good job man. works great

[ge]

seems like it would be a good one for a dockable version. i've seen some people have probes stored off the side of the printer, and when its asked to probe the bed the head moves over to the probe, picks up the probe, does what it needs to and then puts in back.

this could allow you to have the probe actually be lockated far below the head when probing so its away from any metal compontents in the hot end. but then not be in the way when it comes time to print. and this could also make it possible to just have the sensor be located directly below the nozzle so its able to probe the entire printable area of the bed. Sinc ei know right now the way my bltouch is, its so far off the ide of the nozzle that i cant probe the entire bed without making a few more modifications to parts that end up coliding.

no idea how to do it, but it seems like a good way to make best use of this probe.

[voxpop]

As much as this is an amazing probe, it has 1 flaw: it has to be a steel surface / steel embedded surface. As someone who has been using G10 for a while now, this surface will unfortunately not work with beacon and that makes me very sad

[Lidocain]

Slight error. RatOS is not a RR-specific Klipper version. It's a bundle that embeds a pre-configured Raspbian image with Klipper, Moonraker and required tools, and a customized Mainsail UI.
Sure, it provides ready-to-use configs for RR printers, but it's not another Klipper variant.

[stevehanwright]

Also you do an awesome job of explaining what’s happening.. I’m always learning, I relate to you teaching style.. I will be checking out more of you videos. I just bought a voron 2.4. After using Prusa prints for a few years. It a steep learning curve.

[mchanist]

Finally, some actual innovation. Very interesting, very interesting indeed.

[xsunnycrazyx]

The last time I mesh the bed seems probably like last year, I mean I have no idea why we want to mesh the bed every day when it should be the same every time right? What we need is a nozzle probe so we can change the nozzle any time we want.

[ericlotze]

What i wonder is Bambu Labs’ LIDAR/TOF sensor or whatever can be used/developed by the rest of us? Outside of that this seems like the best process i could think of!

( *or did Bambu Labs just use all the VORON / RatRig dev work to make a printer, do a little bit of design on their own, and do *literally the thing that kept consumer FDM from happening for years* to us for a pretty penny)

[harryhalfmoon]

Thank you. Wonderfully detailed, but not overly so, review. Very nice video and sound production too.

[EndroEndro]

it is starting to be more like a compact atrament printer so you can print and scan. it would be handy to resume any print or actually make a simple scanner

[tarakivu]

I think a better way forward is a radar probe, either just light or short wave radar waves so it also detects thin sheets.

[GuysShop]

Nice video. I have looked at that before. Your explanation was very detailed and makes me think it is worthwhile to give it a try. Thanks!