Voltlog #239 – Upgrading The CR10 3D Printer With New Print Surface And Bed Insulation

Welcome to a new voltlog, it’s time for another upgrade on my Creality CR10 3D printer, and this time it’s about the print surface. By default this printer comes with a glass print surface which sits on top of the aluminium bed and that has worked fine for most prints and settings I’ve tried but occasionally I would get some adhesion problems and with glass you need to wait until the part has cooled down in order to remove it. Not such a big deal but there is this newer magnetic print surface, which has two parts, you get the bottom part with adhesive that you stick to the aluminium build plate of the printer and you get the top part which sticks magnetically to the other part.

This way, with the top surface I should get better adhesion and when the print is finished I can just remove the print surface from the printer to have it cool down faster or maybe for easier removal because I could just bend the surface to cause the part to unstick.

I’m also going to upgrade the bottom heater of the bed by installing one of these insulation sheets, this should help it reach working temperature faster and maybe it will use less power to keep it at working temperature.

Voltlog #177 – Installing BLTouch Auto Bed Leveling On The Creality CR-10 3D Printer

Today I’m gonna show you how I installed a bltouch sensor on my creality CR10 3d printer. But first to give you a bit of info, if you are a frequent viewer of the channel than you know I have tried a bunch of different sensors, inductive, capacitive but they either didn’t have enough sensing distance to cover the glass I’m using on top of the aluminium bed or they weren’t giving me repeatable results so they all ended up disconnected.

I had a bunch of adhesion problems because I couldn’t level the bed properly, my bed doesn’t look very good, in fact I’m gonna overlay a picture of my bed after the auto bed leveling has been installed and you’ll see it’s far from being flat so it was really difficult for me to print something that was bigger than a couple of cm’s because the bed wasn’t flat.

Then I found this bltouch sensor or more correctly a clone of the bltouch sensor on aliexpress for just $14 and I said why not, let’s try this one as well and ordered one. And boy was I impressed how much better the printing got after installing it.

Voltlog #145 – How I Failed To Install Auto Bed Leveling On My Creality CR-10

In this video I was supposed to upgrade my Creality CR-10 3D printer with an auto-leveling sensor but I failed to do that and I will explain why in a few minutes. 

The upgrade would involve showing you how to connect the sensor to the motherboard and then flashing the open source marlin firmware to add the auto-leveling features as well as other improvements.

The thing is, nobody tells you that you can’t have the SD card option, the graphical lcd option and the auto bed leveling option active in marlin firmware at the same time when compiling for the stock CR10 board with the atmega1284 which only has 128K of flash memory. The resulting program will simply not fit on that 128K of memory.

Here are links to the stuff mentioned in the video:

Here is how to connect the sensor to your 3d printer using an optocoupler