 Hey everybody, today we're going to take this BL Touch and load it onto this Ender 3 using the TH3D Unified Firmware. My name's Jim and this is the Edge of Tech. So like I said, today we're going to take this Ender 3 and we're going to take this BL Touch and we're going to make it work together with the TH3D Unified Firmware. You could do this using Vanilla Marlin as well, but I really like the TH3D Unified Firmware. It's the same firmware we use on this Ender 3 that has the TH3D Easy ABL that you saw in a previous video. I prefer using the TH3D firmware because it really helps the new users like myself and Tim really helps support if you need it. So I definitely appreciate that. So in the newest editions of the TH3D Unified Firmware, Tim actually built in the BL Touch. And that's what we're going to go through today because as I'm running this one, I'm using an older version of that firmware that I had to make some modifications on to get it to work, but not anymore. It's built right into the source and we can make that work with only the TH3D firmware now. So let's do it. So just a couple of things before we get started. You will already need a bootloader on your machine before you go any further than we are right now. If you have not installed a bootloader on your machine and your machine is bone stock from Creality, you probably need to get one. You can buy a kit from TH3D. I'll link that below if you want to do it quick. He has videos on how to do that and it's very easy. It only takes five to ten minutes tops. My machine already has the bootloader so we can move forward. The next thing you want to do is go to the TH3D website and get the newest version of the firmware. You can find that website at firmware.th3dstudio.com and maybe I can have Caleb put that right here. Firmware.th3dstudio.com The newest version as of this filming was the U1.R2.11 firmware. With that being said, we can go ahead and proceed. I do have the bootloader and I'm going to get the newest firmware as you'll see in one second. So let's do it. So the first thing you want to do is go ahead and take your USB cable and push it right into the front port of your Ender 3. If it is the Ender 3 Pro, you'll see the port up here. The standard Ender 3 will be right there. So I just wanted to show you real quick that we are using TH3D U1.R2.7 currently and that's why we're upgrading to go to the new firmware, the U1.R2.11 that allows the BL Touch to be programmed right in it. Alright, so what I did now is I went ahead and went to firmware.th3dstudio.com and it brought me to the TH3D Unified Firmware Package page. So what we want to do is go down to download the latest firmware which is U1.R2.11 and go ahead and click on that. It'll download and it'll probably take a little bit to download. It looks like it's about 546 MB. It goes pretty quick if you have a decent connection, otherwise it can take just a little bit of time. So once it's downloaded, what you want to do is go ahead and go look at it in the folder. In my case, it's still zipped here. So I'm going to go ahead and extract it and I'm actually going to put it in a folder on the desktop that's actually called TH3D firmware and that's where I'm going to go ahead and extract it too. So it'll go through the extraction process. This can take a little while depending on your computer. Okay, so once it extracts, you'll find all of these folders in here just like this. So what we want to do is go ahead and if you're using a Windows machine, you want to go ahead and click on this one right here. It says openfirmwarewindows.bat. If you're using a Mac, you'll have to do it a little bit different, but we're going to go through the Windows installation today. So we'll go ahead and click on that and allow access and the firmware should pop up just like that in this window. So the first thing we want to do is go ahead and click on configuration.h. And then what we're going to do is hit Ctrl-F on your keyboard and go ahead and type Ender 3 in the search button. We're going to go ahead and search that a couple of times until we get to the Ender 3. On this version, it's line 282 starts the Ender 3. What you want to do is go ahead and remove the slashes right before Define Ender 3 and you'll see it goes green and you're good. Then what you want to do is come down here to line 298 in this firmware. That could change in the future, but it will be under the Ender 3 section and we're going to go ahead and remove those slashes to define the custom probe. Then what we want to do is hit Ctrl-F again and we're going to type in BL-Touch. That'll take us to the bottom of the page or close to the bottom. In this firmware, it's line 815, but it could change in the future firmwares. What you want to do is come down here and remove the slashes in front of Define BL-Touch. And then I'm using a pin 27 board that's already installed. I'm going to go ahead and take those slashes out as well. You can get the pin 27 board, which is this definition here, from TH3D's website as well if you don't already have it. I don't have a V3 BL-Touch, but if you do, you can actually comment this one out instead of the top one. In my case, I believe a first generation or second generation, I'd have to take a look. But that's why we did this line right here. After we define those, we need to go back up here to this custom probe area. In this case, it's in line 681, but that could change in future firmwares. What we need to do is actually tell it the offset from the X and the Y. I'm going to go ahead and show you how to do that and we'll come back to this. What we need to do to get these measurements is we need to take the measurement between the tip of the nozzle here and the tip of the BL-Touch. If you have a bullseye duct like this one is, they do tell you what that is and the instructions are the bullseye. But in this case, I want to make sure I show you. I'm going to take my caliper here and I'm just going to reset it to zero. And then I'm going to go ahead and measure between the tip of the nozzle and the tip of the BL-Touch here. That looks like 46.93, so we could call that 47 probably. The next thing you want to do is go ahead and measure how far forward the BL-Touch is from your nozzle. This one kind of gets tricky. I like to measure it kind of sideways like this and eye it from the side. You can use a ruler to do this, you don't have to use a caliper, but basically you're going to kind of eye it from the side and kind of get an idea. So I have about 13 millimeters, but you get the idea. So basically what you want to do is first measure this way, how far from the nozzle to the side. And the second you want to measure this way. So X first, Y second, and we're going to put those definitions in the software now. Okay, so once you get your X and your Y offsets measured, what we need to do is go ahead and insert them in here. So the X offset from the extruder is the one we measured first. And I double-checked with the BL-Touch on the PETSFANG thingiverse page, and it should be negative 42. And it's negative because it's to the left as you can see here. If your sensor is on the right, you want to do a positive number. In my case, it's negative 42. The Y offset should be negative 5. And what that does is it creates the offset of where the probe is compared to the nozzle in the TH3D firmware. So now that you've got your X and your Y probe offsets entered, what we need to do is go up here to configuration backend.h. And what we want to do is search with Ctrl-F, and we want to do fix underscore and enter. What that does is it shows us fix underscore mounted underscore probe. And we want to change this to say BL-Touch, to make it a little more custom for the BL-Touch. So we want to type it in just how it is. So we want to capital fix underscore mounted underscore probe. And then right here where it says replace with, let's type in BL-Touch. And we go ahead and hit replace all. That'll replace everything that said fix underscore mounted underscore probe with the word BL-Touch. Now if you try to search this fix mounted, you will not find it. See? Nothing. But if we go ahead and take out that and paste in BL-Touch and hit find, now you'll see it. It should be about five or six instances right around there. But they'll all say BL-Touch now. That just makes it a little more custom to what we're doing. So go ahead and close that. And we should be good. So the next thing we want to do is go ahead and go to tools. You want to make sure that the processor, I'm sorry, the board is a Sanguino 1284P board. Just like this. You want to go to the port that the printer is connected in your computer. In my case, it seems to be port five. If you don't know how to do that, you can right click and go to manage on this PC. Go to device manager. Go to ports and you'll see that the serial port is COM five when I have this plugged in. Now it's very important that we do not have Kira or anything else that's going to use COM ports open when we do this next part. Make sure we're on COM five here. We're on the Sanguino 1284 there. And then what we want to do is go ahead to the top left and hit the check mark. And what that's going to do is compile the sketch, make sure everything is going to fit on the board that comes from Creality because it's a very small space. And since we already had a PL touch installed before, I don't see this being a problem, but we're going to go ahead and let that load. It takes a minute or two depending on your computer. So now we are done compiling as it says here. It looks like we're going to work. We don't have any warnings because we're using only 90%, 96% of the storage space here. So then we're going to go up here to upload and go ahead and click upload. Now what this will do is go ahead and compile that sketch again. And then it'll start the upload process to the ender three, which is awaiting the firmware upload as we speak. So as you can see it's going through, I can raise this up so you can see a little better. It's writing to the ender three. This only takes maybe about a minute. It doesn't take that long. It's writing everything we did to the ender three here. And it is done. It did work, which is great. And it should be on the ender three now. So let's go look. Okay. So what we want to do is go ahead and unplug the USB port and that will shut the ender three down. And you'll see the screen go off just like this. Then go ahead and turn the ender three back on and make sure everything boots up. Okay. There we go. So now it says the BL touch is ready. So if we go ahead and click this button and we go to control. We go down to BL touch and we hit BL touch self test. You can hear it going up and down right now. I'm going to go ahead and show that on the camera just so you guys can see that as well. So now if I go ahead and click the menu button and I go down to control and I go down to BL touch and hit BL touch self test. We should see the probe going down and up just like that. And it is good to go. So what we want to do is go ahead and start a print and just make sure it probes okay. And then we'll go from there. Okay. So the first thing I want to do while it's heating up is let's just try an auto home. So what we'll do in a new firmware, hit the button, go to prepare, hit the button again and go down to auto home. Now this should auto home our printer. So we got the X and the Y. Then we should go to the about the middle of the bed and come down and get our Z just like that. So we know that the BL touch is working and it's stopping, which is great. So the next thing I want to do is go ahead and start a print and I already sliced one and there's one on the SD card. So what I'm going to print is the TH3D power supply cover that is for their mean well power supply. It'll go down through the center and just home like that. And then it should start the probe probing process. I have it set up for a three by three grid and it's going to go ahead and go through the whole probe now. And we're going to go ahead and watch it, but we'll speed it up in time lapse. Okay, so in my case it's done. It's went through the whole probing. And now we're just waiting for the hot end to finish heating up. And that should be any second now. So if you follow us on the Luke Hatfield Creativity Help Guide, I do use Luke's Start G code, which will come to the front of the bed once it's heated up and it'll start puking filament. That's what we call it. It'll start dumping a whole bunch of filament very quickly and that purges and cleans out your nozzle just like that. I'm going to go ahead and pull that off there. After about seven seconds, you'll see this go and we'll get the print started. And so what we might need to do is called baby stepping. And you can do that by pressing this two times while it's printing. So it does look like we needed a little bit of baby stepping, but that's it. And I apologize, I didn't realize we had black filament in here. But it is going around. It is printing and we have a good stick all the way around the bed. So I can say now that the BL Touch is working on the Ender 3 with the TH3D Unified Firmware, the brand new one. It is printing very good right now. It just got done drawing the outline of the TH3D logo and now it's kind of going around. But they really did make it very easy for this to work. If you didn't want to modify the name to say BL Touch, it actually is a very simple process without any modification. Alright, so what you just saw was the BL Touch installed on an Ender 3 using the new TH3D Unified Firmware. Remember, this can be actually done on any of the printers that Tim offers on the TH3D Unified Firmware that you can install a BL Touch on. So if you wanted to do this on other Creality products, you can do the same way using the TH3D Unified Firmware. Also remember that this video did not go over the installation of the BL Touch or the bootloader needed for the firmware. There are tons of videos out there for that and I know Teaching Tech did a really good one on installing the BL Touch. So check that out. But what we did do today is use the brand new unified firmware from TH3D that has the BL Touch settings built right in and installed that firmware with the BL Touch settings on this Ender 3. I just want to throw a huge shout out to Tim for actually including the BL Touch on his unified firmware because I know it's a direct competitor to the easy ABL that I have on this machine over here. I like to run both. That way I can help people with both sensors. Personally, I really prefer the easy ABL. It's faster, a little more reliable, and the installation is just as easy as this is. Actually, it's probably easier. Well, thanks Tim. I appreciate you throwing the competitor sensor on your firmware to make it easier for the thousands of people that have that. Now, I hope this video helps the people that are stuck on the old firmwares and want to go to the new firmware and make it so much easier on themselves with the BL Touch. Well, I hope you learned something today and as always, keep printing. Subscribe below if you want to help out that way. You guys rock!