Hey, folks, Alah, Mandic, MandicReally here and right next to me
on the workbench is the Elegoo Neptune 2, FDM 3-D printer.
An audience member recently asked, "Can
you install a BL Touch on to the Neptune 2?" You absolutely can!
And I'm going to show you how from beginning to end in this video.
So let's get to it.
DON'T do it. The best thing I can say is don't install
BL Touch on the Elegoo Neptune 2.
Putting this on here broke my brain.
That said, I'm going to go ahead and show you how to install it on here,
how to set it up so you can make an informed decision for yourself.
And then I'll come back toward the end of this video to tell you why
I do not recommend that you run an Automatic Level Sensor on the Neptune 2.
. There'll be timestamps down below if you just want to go ahead
and jump to that rant later on in the video.
That said, back to past me.
The Elegoo Neptune 2, has been sweeping the review pages.
There are so many reviews of this machine out there.
I actually picked this machine up for a review so I could
figure out for myself if it was a machine that I could recommend to my audience.
And I do think that I have a different take on this machine
than some of the other folks out there,
so get subscribe and click that notification bell
so you can be informed when my review does go live.
But that's down the road.
I have a BL Touch here on the workbench ready to install on
to this machine, and it's really pretty straightforward to do.
I'm going to walk you through it and show
you every little part of the process so you know how to do it.
The gantry plate on this machine is already pre drilled and tapped
to the right of that fancy Neptune shroud, which this indicates to me
that it was intended for installation of a bed level sensor in that area.
But I haven't seen Elegoo launch a mount for this yet.
So I went ahead and designed up
two different mount brackets for a BL Touch on this machine.
Installation is very straightforward.
My brackets are designed to bolt
to the gantry plate through those two existing pre-tapped holes.
And then the sensor simply screws to the underside of that bracket.
However, I need to get this "Can'D Grenade" design off of the print
bed real quick. So let's pop that off there.
Who doesn't love cracking things off the bed?
I don't know, I find it very satisfying.
Now, the BL Touch bracket that I designed has you screw two M3 screws
through the BL Touch into the mount directly.
And I don't love doing this,
but it is fairly common in 3D printing to just screw into plastic.
It's sized well, this shouldn't be an issue for you,
but these threads could wear out over time if you need to service or change things.
So you could always
put longer screws in there later and nuts on the backside of them if need be.
Now, as for the wiring we're going to need
for this specific application, we need the five wire, wire harness
that has the Brown, Yellow, Red, Black and White wires on it.
I went ahead and sleeved nylon braiding over the sensor wires for my build,
but you don't have to do this. It just gave it a cleaner aesthetic.
And the Elegoo Neptune 2 is a it pretty clean looking machine.
So I like that. Just route your wires along with the bowden
tube, along past the extruder drive assembly.
Zip tie them together and you're good.
I should note that the wires that came with my BL Touch for
this scenario were a little shorter than I would have liked,
so I wasn't able to route with the entire hot end harness.
I would have needed to extend the wires to do that.
And I didn't want to do that in this video.
So what I ended up doing is I made a little loop off the side of the hot
end wiring down to the Z axis motor, and I zip tied down to that.
That was a shorter run that got away from the bed.
So I'm not worried about it snagging on the slinging bed
and allowed me to reach the mainboard as I need it.
Our next step is to flip the machine on to its side, remove the bottom panel
on the electronics case so we can get to the main board and make our connections.
Once the bottom cover is off, we can see the Robin Nano based mainboard
that is in this thing with the built in TMC drivers.
This is overall a pretty solid 32-bit arm processor equipped mainboard
that Elegoo picked for this machine.
And it does have a dedicated BL Touch port, right by the memory card
slot on the board.
We simply need to follow the rest of the harness into the electronics
box for this machine and then go directly to our BL Touch point.
We don't have enough length,
with my harness anyway, to snake along with the other wires.
Now, the three pin connector from the harness
that we're using has a Brown, Yellow and Red wire on it.
That is going to the BL Touch port.
The Yellow wire from that harness should line up with the S terminal
on the BL Touch port, which in my orientation here is the top terminal.
I should make a quick note
that I had the LCD removed from the machine off out of the way.
That was solely for filming purposes
so I could get a clear shot of what I was doing for you folks.
You don't actually have to do that while you're installing this.
We only have one more connection we need to make,
and that is the Black and White 2-pin wire connection.
Now, along the top of this board, in this image, anyway,
you will see a handful of connectors.
Those are your different end stop limit switches.
We're looking for the Z Negative. Z-.
That is your Z end stop, a.k.a.
the switch at the bottom of your frame right next to your bed.
You can remove the Z-End
stop switch from the machine entirely when you're running the auto
bed level sensor, as it will use the sensor as the Z homing switch.
Now we're going to unplug that one and plug the
BL Touch 2-wire connection into that port on the board.
There are three terminals in that connector.
We want to be on the two that are closer to the inside of the board,
closer to the processor.
I'm not 100% if it matters, but I put it with the White wire
on the inboard and the Black wire in the middle of the connection.
And that worked well for me.
This is a good point to step in and note
that I do have an accompanying blog post for this project on my Web site.
You'll find a link in the description down below and the comments
where I have some photos and a little write up information about this project.
So if you need a reference while you're doing this,
you don't have to refer back to this video.
You can refer to that blog post if that works for you.
After a while, connections are made.
That's it inside of this electronics case.
So we can go ahead and put the cover back onto it,
making sure to install the shortest screw that does come out of the cover
in the very far front corner next to the LCD screen.
It's kind of obvious once
you realize that there is one shorter screw where it's supposed to go.
If you don't put that there, you'll end up
with a little divet on the outside of the electronics cover.
Ask me how I know.
With all that done, it's time to jump over to the computer
and we're going to do the firmware
and configuration file side of this installation.
The files that you're going to need for
this will not be found on Elegoo's Web site.
I don't know why they don't have them there, but at the moment,
they do not have the files you need for the BL Touch conversion
or the latest firmware for this machine on their Web site.
I had to contact them directly and ask them for these files
so that they could send them to me.
With that, I'm going to put it on my GitHub page so you don't have to jump
through those hoops.
There'll be a link in the description down below.
Gonna be a lot of links in the description down below...
but there'll be one down there to my GitHub page. Let's head over there now.
Once you're on my GitHub page, I'm
going to directly link you to this, but there's the Neptune 2 folder,
which has the firmware that you need right in this file.
There's a zip file in here, as well as a README,
which is just a little explanation from me of how you can walk through this.
But I'm going to walk you through it step by step in this video.
We're going to click the green code button up in the corner and just download Zip
and that should download all the files within this directory for us.
After that downloads, we're just going to open up the zip file
and then extract these files to wherever you like to store things.
I have a dedicated file for firmware on my computer, but it's up to you.
Once we unpack everything, get to the directory where it's all saved.
We're going to have two different folder options here.
We have V1 and V2.
This is where it's going to matter what board you have in your machine.
My Neptune 2 has the V1.2 Robin Nano board in it.
But there are some machines out there that have the V1.3
Robin Nano board in them.
If you have the V1.2 to board, as I do in my machine,
you're going to want the firmware version V1.0.3
Open that folder and that's going to contain the files you need.
However, if you have the V1.3 board,
then you need the other folder, the V2.0.1
Now Elegoo's read me file that is included in the downloads that I'm giving you
does actually tell you how
you can determine which board you have based off of your serial number.
So if you've already closed up your electronics case
and you don't know which one it is, you can look at the serial number
and figure that out with the info in the README file.
Now for the next step, we need the T.F.
card, the SD card out of our 3D printer.
Make sure you power down,
remove your 3D printer's SD card and put that into your computer.
What you need to do after you determine which firmware you need,
you need to go in there and copy all four files that are present in there.
You'll have Elegoo_font, Elegoo_pic, Elegoo.bin and Elegoo.txt Copy
those from there and go into your SD card and paste them onto the SD card.
And that's really it.
Once that's done safely, eject the SD card,
that does matter when you're working with 3D printers, eject it.
And now you can take that SD card.
You can go over to your printer, Power off the printer,
Put the card into the card slot, Power the printer on,
and it'll go through the normal boot process.
But while it does, the bootloader will actually flash
the firmware with the updated configuration file for your machine.
Now it's time to do Z-Probe Offset adjustment.
And it's really pretty straightforward.
I do commend Elegoo for the implementation that they have on this... to a point.
We'll talk about that later.
Go into your "Tool" menu and then you'll have instead
of the previous "Leveling" option, now you'll have an "Auto Leveling" option.
I recommend you hit that and let the machine do an auto leveling run.
It will probe 4x4 grid across the bed surface, running the auto level.
When the auto level is complete,
it will go directly into the Z-Probe Offset adjustment.
What's going to do
is take a piece of A4 printer paper, stick it underneath of that nozzle,
and then slowly lower down the nozzle
through the menu options until you get just a slight bit of drag on it.
You can change from 1mm, to .1mm, down to 0.01mm adjustments.
And I would recommend going that fine with your adjustments, because this is
what's going to determine how well your auto leveling actually works.
That is the setup of the BL Touch on the Elegoo Neptune 2
from installation to firmware to Z-probe offset and Printing.
You can see I'm laying down a pretty darn good first layer in GreenGate3D
"Mars Red" PETG, and it is laying down beautifully on the bed.
With all the explanations out of the way, all of the showing you, it's
time for me to explain why I'm removing the BL Touch from my Neptune 2.
I just don't like the way
that Elegoo has implemented auto leveling on the Neptune 2. It's
just not the way that I would expect it to operate or want it to operate.
I have multiple machines
that run auto bed leveling sensors, but they all operate differently
than this one does.
Those machines have "Start G-Code" added in the slicer that tell them to run
an auto level before every print and then use that data within that print.
So you have a fresh, accurate reading right before every single print you do.
However, this machine, you have to go into the menu system,
tell it to do an auto level.
And when you do,
I said it has that Z-Probe tool, which is an excellent Z-Probe tool.
But every time it erases the Z-Probe offset and you have to redo it
after the auto level.
Now, for me, I would want to do an auto level before every single print.
Maybe when I remove the bed plate and put it back on, something changed.
Maybe I bumped one of the wheels while I was taking the print off of there.
I should update that data before every print.
But now I have to reset the Z-Probe Offset every time.
And I guess that will give you the most accurate Z-Probe Offset.
But I found like it
varied every single time I did it, which started to make me question
whether something is wrong in the machine or not.
So then I decided to really test it.
I turned the right front to adjuster wheel 2 full
turns on this machine to suck that corner of the bed down.
Now, that's an extreme case, but I wanted to see how the machine
would offset for that, how the auto leveling would correct for it.
I then did a fresh auto level in this machine, set the Z-Probe Offset again,
and then started the exact same print that I showed you previously.
And the first same layer, exact same G-Code between each run,
from the previous one to this one. I just changed filaments.
Same brand, different color.
And while I could see the Z-Axis motor working to try
and compensate for that difference, it just couldn't compensate enough.
One side of the print was OK.
The other side of the print was far too close to the bed,
and it just wasn't making the difference that I wanted it to.
You might say that that's an unfair test, but that was the point.
The point was to push it to its limits and see if it failed.
To me Auto Bed Leveling is NOT a replacement for Manual Bed Leveling.
You should still periodically manually level your bed.
So when the auto level sensor
does its job, it doesn't have to work as hard to compensate.
It can do a better job
with an already manually leveled bed than it could with an out of level bed.
This is a pet peeve I have about auto bed level
sensors, that I feel like a lot of people lean on them as a crutch.
And the way that Elegoo has implemented it on this machine is leaning into that.
I already mentioned why I don't like that.
When you go into the tool and you now have "Auto Leveling",
but you no longer have the "Leveling" menu
to allow you to easily, accurately, manually level this bed consistently.
You're going to have to disable the stepper motors,
go through the process of pushing the bed
and hot end around to get it where you want it to be.
It's just not as refined of a system and less likely that
people are going to do it as often as they should as a result.
Now, the reason I was so dramatic in the beginning of this video is because
I had just spent multiple days trying to compile my own custom firmware,
play with the configuration files, change the wiring set up on this machine,
just trying anything I could to get this machine
to operate as any of my other auto leveling printers do.
Recently, I put in over 150 hours of PETG printing on this machine,
and I manually leveled for that entire process.
I only manually leveled a couple of times throughout there,
and it worked beautifully.
At the end of the day,
you're going to have to decide
for yourself whether or not the implementation here is for you.
It's not for me.
If you are going to do it, I highly recommend that you still
manually level your machine as best you can, as often as you can.
Elegoo, if you're watching this PLEASE put some way in there
for us to have both the auto leveling functionality
and that manual leveling system in there so that I can use
both of them in conjunction with each other.
That's still not the way that I would like to do
auto leveling on this machine, but it is a better system
than I think you have currently.
Alright folks, that's going to wrap it up for this one.
I hope you found it interesting.
If you did, please go ahead and drop it LIKE it really helps out.
Let me know in the COMMENTS down below.
Are you still going to install an auto bed level sensor on your Neptune 2?
Or are you think twice about it now?
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