Voltlog #265 – FT232H USB to JTAG/I2C/SPI Interface With Python & PyFtdi

Welcome to a new voltlog, today we’re going to be talking about this little board which I designed and assembled myself, it’s a breakout module for the FTDI FT232H which is a usb to serial converter but with a nice twist. This particular chip from FTDI has the built-in Multi-Protocol Synchronous Serial Engine (MPSSE short) which allows you to run a variety of synchronous serial protocols like JTAG, I2C, SPI or simple bit-banging of IOs. You can imagine it can be really useful to be able to interface with a sensor over I2C or SPI straight from your computer over USB through this interface. You wouldn’t need an arduino or other controller in the middle if you plan to do some data acquisition for example.

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.