Automatic bed leveling (& what your printer does?)

Bambu Lab P1 Series
1

Before getting into things, I’d really like to hear how often people’s printers only do the 5 point bed check and goes on to printing, and how often it doesn’t pass and goes thru the entire automatic bed leveling procedure? A rough guesstimate is fine…

I have a P1S and I’m curious about the bed leveling. I will print multiple things in a row that don’t take all that long (10 min to 2 hours} and when I start the next print, the automatic leveling starts off by measuring 5 points. Very rarely does it pass this check and begin printing and instead does the entire bed check (don’t remember how many points) and then printing.

Is there any way to see the data and the z offset for each point? Or does anyone have any idea what variations are allowed by the 5 point check to go straight to printing and skip the full ABL? It must be quite small or else there’s a lot more variation in height than I’d expect.

It would be nice to not have to do the ABL for each print when there’s no changes and I don’t even remove the build plate most of the time. Is there any way to look at the logs and the previous saved points to see how much change is going on? I know I can skip it but would like to know what’s changing if the printer is deciding not to skip it.

2

I believe if you uncheck the bed levelling box it just uses previously stored bed level and resonance data. I just do it every time, as I do remove the plate every time and some large prints I can feel it pulling up on the bed before it releases. It only adds a few extra seconds to the time anyway but I can imagine some others may want it to start quicker. I did try the fast start g-code profile that’s getting around but kept getting print failures due to first layer issues. My bed is noticeably warped though, so maybe this has more of an effect on whether skipping the bed levelling would work for you or not.

1 Like
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@FlaMtnBkr seems to do it every other time for me. I tend to remove the bed after every print though so that may be the issue. TBH though, what’s an extra 5 minutes if you’re reducing failure risk?

4

If you can remove the model and purge lines without removing the plate, it generally just does the 5 points and starts. Mine seems to mostly fail on the back left corner even thought I run my finger over the back edges to make sure It’s not sitting on top of the guides. If I do a small print I don’t do bed levelling even if I’d just turned the machine on.