 Recently, I did a video about calibrating the E-steps on a 3D printer. I got a lot of comments asking how to do it on a direct drive extruder. Today, that's what we're going to do. I'm Jim, and this is the edge of tech. Calibrating your E-steps is a very important part to getting your 3D printer dialed in. Most of the videos you can find out there, show it being done with a Bowdoin drive system, just like this video right here. But today I'm going to show you how to do it with a direct drive extruder. And I'm going to be using the Ender 3S1 Pro to demonstrate that. So I'm going to make this pretty quick and easy for you. Let's do it. First, let's heat up our printer to 210 degrees. And if you don't already have filament loaded, push filament in the top of the extruder and push it out. So it starts coming out the bottom. Now, this next part's a little bit tricky. You want to take a millimeter ruler or a caliper, and you want to hold it right at the top of your extruder and come up to 100 millimeters. Mark that with a Sharpie right at 100 millimeters. And what you should end up with is it's very hard to see on camera, but there's a Sharpie mark right at 100 millimeters right there. Then what you want to do is measure that again at 120 millimeters. So there's about 120 millimeters right here. We'll measure it again. So we have one at 100 millimeters here, one at 120 millimeters there. And you should end up with filament with two black marks right here from your Sharpie. Kind of hard to see that on the camera, but I promise they're there. Now what you want to do is tell your printer to extrude 100 millimeters. In this case, I go to ready, in and out. I choose the in and I type in 100 millimeters. So it says 100 millimeters. And when I'm ready, I'll hit this check mark. Once you do that, the printer will start extruding and pulling in 100 millimeters and pushing it out through the hot end. If you're getting value from today's video, please smash that like button. It really helps the video get pushed all around further into the community on YouTube and helps show more people as well. I really appreciate it. Now back to it. So when it's done, you'll see that you'll have two lines here and a lot of times, if you make the Sharpie mark thin enough, you won't see this bottom line or it'll be just into the extruder, which is what you want. That would be 100 millimeters. In my case, I used a big Sharpie and kind of made a mess of that line, but it did go the 100 millimeters. I see the little extra mark I made and it's right there. So that's what we want to see. That means it pulled in 100 millimeters. If your first line was way out of the extruder like that still, that means you under extruded. So what you would do is take your ruler, hold it up to the extruder like so and measure from the extruder up to that first line. In this case, it looks like it would be roughly 10 millimeters or seven millimeters or so. So what that means is we told the machine to extrude 100 millimeters and it only extruded 93 because you would subtract how many millimeters are left in here. So if we had seven, you'd take 100 minus seven would be 93. To look at this another way, if your first line was completely buried and you don't see it anywhere there and you measured, remember our second line should have been 20 millimeters. That's the second line we did. It's hard to see in the camera there, but it's there. So if you measure this and it's anything less than 20 millimeters, that means we over extruded. In this case, it looks like I was at roughly 13 millimeters because I know that the top of my line is a 20 millimeters there at 12 to 13. So, so in this case, this would say I over extruded. So what you would do is see how much you over extruded by measuring from your line down to the extruder and adding that to 100. So in this case, it's roughly 12 millimeters. So we would take that eight plus 100 and it'd be 108 and that's the number we would use here. So ideally, like I show, you just see your 100 millimeter line right here. And this line still measures 20 millimeters and you're good. Anything more it over extruded, anything less it under extruded. The next thing we need to do is get the current E steps from the printer. And I like to use Pronter face if the printer does not allow you to do it right from the control panel. In this case, the Ender 3S1 Pro, you can't see the current steps right from the control panel. So we need to plug the printer in via USB, then open up your slicer or in my case, Pronter face here, come up to the comport that it's on. In my case, Com3 will hit the connect button and it'll connect. Then I just slid this big window over. So our window over here is larger. I come down and I type M503 and hit Enter. When I do that, what we need to look for is the line right here. That says M92 and then a bunch of numbers. In this case, we're looking for the E. So the E is your extruder steps. It is 424.90. So our extruder steps on this director of extruder are 424.90. Now that we have the current E steps, we want to pop on to the TH3D Easy Calculator version 1.1. This is a website. The link will be in the description below. And we need to enter our current E steps right here. In our case, I believe it was 424.90. Then what we need to do is enter the extruded, actual extruded length. When we measured, we were on at 100. You may not be, but in our case, we were. So we'll just put 100 and if you come down here, it'll give you the new value that you should be using. So for argument's sake, in this video, if you got maybe 95 E steps, you found that it under extruded. You would enter 95 and it would give you a brand new value. In this case, 447.26. Maybe you over extruded and you got 105 instead of 100. Then you get 404.67. Either way, it's going to give you your brand new E step value right here. In our case, we didn't get anything different. So we're going to use 100 and that'll be 424.90, just like we got. Now, if you notice down here, it'll show you the new M92 command that we need to use in our case, because we cannot do this straight from the control panel. If we need to do this from the control panel, you just go into the control panel, cycle over to where you can find your E steps, program them and then save it. In our case, we have to do it just like we showed you. We're going to use Pronterface. So copy this M92 E424.90. Then what we want to do is go back to Pronterface, go into our little box and paste that. So when we paste that command, it'll send the command over to the printer to find out if that worked. We can do an M503. And when you find that line that says M92 on it right here, look for your E number. It will tell you if you've programmed it or not. So in our case, we stuck with the 424.90. If yours changed, it'll have a new number right here. And the last thing you want to do if you change your extruder steps is to make sure you save it. If we go back to TH3D's website, right here, it says what we want to do is save to the eProm by sending M500 after using the above command. So in Pronterface, you would just type M500, hit OK. And it's stored, settings stored. After you saved your settings or put these into the control panel on the printer and saved them, you're good. That's all you have to do. Your E-steps are now updated. All said and done, once your printer is heated up, this should only take roughly 10 minutes to do the whole process. It's super fast and super easy. Once you do it once, I highly recommend you doing it one more time just to make sure that 100 millimeters gets extruded when you tell the machine to do 100 millimeters. If not, run the numbers one more time and make that adjustment and just check it again when you're done. Let me know in the comments what you think of that TH3D calculator site. I think it's awesome, the less math that I have to do, the better. And it really makes the process like this super easy. Calibrating the E-steps is one step to getting your hotend dialed in. But there's something else you need to do next to make sure that the filament is flowing exactly how you want it. Check out this video right here to get your hotend completely dialed in and printing the best it can.