Here is my journey of getting a BLTouch Auto Bed Leveling probe installed on my printer. It was a surprising fairly easy setup.
So a bit of back story I do not have a stock mainboard in my printer. I have the BigTreeTech SKR Mini E3 1.2v that I have mentioned in my previous post. It has been a great experience so far and 100% would recommend it as an upgrade either the 1.2 version or 2.0 version. I am constantly tinkering and playing with my printer in the effort to try and get the best quality of prints out of it, I know if I would have bought a more expensive printer to begin with I would already have a ton of the features and upgrades I am doing to this printer but I would not learn the things I have along the way.
You might be asking what does the Auto Bed Leveling do? Well to put it simply it doesn't exactly do what the name suggest but it does help. You still have to level, or better referred to as Tram the build surface to same plane as your print head it is not necessarily level like you would get with a bubble level or something. What the Auto Bed Leveling does it helps adjust for the small inconsistencies in your build surface that could be off by a few points of a millimeter that could make the difference between a good bed adhesion and a good first print layer quality.
The touch sensor I got is this Kit found on Amazon. To get it to work I did have to swap a pin on the dupont connector. To figure out what cable I needed to move and what configuration is needed I did have to go on the hunt for some information.
First I referenced BIgTreeTech's github reference material for installing a BLTouch for my mainboard and got the correct pin order for it. Then I referenced the included instructions with the BLTouch probe and with a bit of interpterion figured out I needed to swap the Red and Blue cable to match up to the Red and Brown cable on the github reference material.
VCC = 5V
GND = GND
SIG = PA1
After getting that all sorted out then I routed the cables through the wiring harness and installed the connectors to the ports on the mainboard. Once everything was wired up and buttoned back up I downloaded the pre-configured firmware labeled "firmware-bltouch.bin", renamed it to "firmeware.bin" and threw it on the memory card and booted up the printer and it updated the printer's firmware.
Here is a video of the printer going through the probing process.
I did run into some issues after getting everything updated and trying to use the mesh setting that is created from the Probe but discovered my Z Offset in the settings was set to high and it was causing the issues. Once I got that sorted out everything is printing smoothly again.
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