Bed Leveling
As new printer owners will quickly discover, constantly leveling your bed is a huge pain, and handling it automatically quickly becomes a huge time saver, and is easily worth investing in.
One of the most commonly recommended bed leveling technologies is an after-market printer upgrade called the BLTouch. This sensor has a physical probe that drops down for high accuracy regardless of the surface being probed. However, at ~$50, the BLTouch can sometimes be out of people's budget. However, fear not! There are cheaper alternatives.
Capacitive and inductive sensors make up the next bracket of bed leveling sensors, and will work well (even better than the BLTouch) in some circumstances, but they are less reliable overall. Another consideration to make it that capacitive and especially inductive sensors have a lot of trouble with glass build surfaces, a very common upgrade many people choose to make. There are work-arounds to these issues, however a capacitive/inductive sensor will never perform quite as well as a BLTouch on glass build surfaces.
Lastly, if you opted for the automatic bed leveling option when purchasing your Tarantula, you will recieve the SN04 sensor, which actually works on inductive technology. This sensor performs quite well for an inductive, but still has the same issues of its relatives.
It's important to know the difference between calibrating your nozzle height and leveling your bed. Leveling your bed manually involves turning the nuts on the bottom of your bed to get the surface parallel with the X and Y axes. However, automatic bed leveling makes no physical alterations to your printer, it simply uses a sensor to detect any issues with how your bed is leveled (and even any warping/bumps in your bed) and compensates for these variations in software. This will NOT automatically set your Z offsets, this is still a process that you still need to do manually. However, you only need to find your Z offset once, and the printer should maintain the proper distance between your nozzle and bed, unlike bed leveling which often seems to undo itself after every print.
Now that we've learned about automatic bed leveling, let's take a look at how to make these upgrades to your printer!
One of the most commonly recommended bed leveling technologies is an after-market printer upgrade called the BLTouch. This sensor has a physical probe that drops down for high accuracy regardless of the surface being probed. However, at ~$50, the BLTouch can sometimes be out of people's budget. However, fear not! There are cheaper alternatives.
Capacitive and inductive sensors make up the next bracket of bed leveling sensors, and will work well (even better than the BLTouch) in some circumstances, but they are less reliable overall. Another consideration to make it that capacitive and especially inductive sensors have a lot of trouble with glass build surfaces, a very common upgrade many people choose to make. There are work-arounds to these issues, however a capacitive/inductive sensor will never perform quite as well as a BLTouch on glass build surfaces.
Lastly, if you opted for the automatic bed leveling option when purchasing your Tarantula, you will recieve the SN04 sensor, which actually works on inductive technology. This sensor performs quite well for an inductive, but still has the same issues of its relatives.
It's important to know the difference between calibrating your nozzle height and leveling your bed. Leveling your bed manually involves turning the nuts on the bottom of your bed to get the surface parallel with the X and Y axes. However, automatic bed leveling makes no physical alterations to your printer, it simply uses a sensor to detect any issues with how your bed is leveled (and even any warping/bumps in your bed) and compensates for these variations in software. This will NOT automatically set your Z offsets, this is still a process that you still need to do manually. However, you only need to find your Z offset once, and the printer should maintain the proper distance between your nozzle and bed, unlike bed leveling which often seems to undo itself after every print.
Now that we've learned about automatic bed leveling, let's take a look at how to make these upgrades to your printer!