Installing a 3d Touch probe to an Ender 3 V2 3D Printer

Sigh, things shouldn't be this hard should they? And yet the small package arrived with no instructions at all, a couple of screws, a couple of wires and that's about it. Leaving me to (along with Google) to figure where everything goes.

I got there in there end but just before I ripped out the whole thing and set it on fire out of frustration..

SHOULDN'T THAT SAY BL TOUCH ON THE SIDE?

Sure if you bought a genuine one. Mine however came from the bargain bin markets of Aliexpress which explains why it's a generic 3D touch generic probe (same as the gear you get on Amazon and eBay, ready to do the same thing - work out how unbalanced your printer bed is and compensate as needed. 

Getting it to actually make friends with the system, well that was a few hours in the making.

FIRSTLY IT DOESN'T COME WITH A BRACKET (OR THE SCREWS NEEDED FOR ONE)

But being a 3d printing part, we can just print one up. The one seen above is the work of MatthewK_ on Thingiverse: 

Ender 3 V2 bl-touch mount with screw threads

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4702382

The screws themselves were salvaged from a failing hard drive so no need for a trip to Bunnings, joy!

THERE WERE (QUITE) A FEW SETUP PROBLEMS

-I thought I killed my screen because it went blank for a time

-My Z axis strangely ended up a foot in the air and wouldn't come down

-Auto homing Z made the machine try to drill my hot end through the plate itself and wouldn't stop until I killed the power. This happened quite a few times.

-The 3D touch started clicking away like a mad bastard randomly

-My Ender 3 V2 spent a lot of time on it's side as I looked annoyingly at the motherboard time and time again trying to work out what happened..

BUT THEN ON THE FINAL TRY, I GOT IT (HOORAY!)

And in order of steps:

1. Mount the 3D touch to the bracket and the bracket to the holes on the side of the hot end. Use the long wires provided, not the short ones.

2. Cable tie the wires to the wire mesh to keep them out of harms way,

3. Open up the access panel to your motherboard (mine's a 4.2.2 for sake of what we're working with.)

4. Remove the Z Stop wire. That's the third one down on this side of the board (and you can just see the Z behind the rubber guard.) Once removed, you can now take your entire Z switch assembly off the side of your printer because all going well, your probe will now be your new Z stop.

5. Now here's the bit that cost me hours of time trying to work out - have your wires setup in this configuration as above: 

TOP

White

Black

Yellow

Red

Green

BOTTOM

Yes, that's the 3 port and the 2 port connectors side by side. Originally I had the black and white in the Z switch wire port but no, they need to go on top for this particular probe to work. 

And until I switched the bottom three around (originally when I had it Green, Red, Yellow from top the bottom) it didn't use the probe as a Z stop and kept on going down to the point where it was about to break itself..

You know the probe is happy when you power the machine on and it self tests by clicking and moving its probe needle back and forth a couple of times.

He looks happy! For this model if he flashes red, he's not happy for whatever reason..

6. Update the firmware to work with your new toy. Because I'm using JyersUI firmware on my machine, I opted for the BL Touch Firmware for the 4.2.2 with Universal bed levelling. Once you put this firmware on your card though, change the name to something simple otherwise it might not take. In my case Beer.bin as the only file on the SD card worked fine and stopped the problem of a blank screen staring at me stupidly.

7. Determine your Z Stop Offset. A quick YouTube can describe this better than I can so here's one someone already created earlier! Mine is set at -3.40

8. Get to auto levelling! Select Auto Level from your new Level Menu and watch the probe do its thing, checking out various level points across the board. When down you can save these settings and provided no wild kids or animals run by and try adjusting your bed springs randomly

9. Update your slicer. You now need a line of code in there that tells the slicer to refer to the touch for levelling information. Like me you can easily copy and post the code from this page.

10. Get to printing! I'm still having some adhesion issues at the moment (bed needs a clean) but the probe seems to be working at the moment after hours of troubleshooting - I got there in the end.

Hopefully it works for you too! (Let me know down below if it did!)

EDIT: 3 DAYS LATER

Look, I'm going to have to be honest here - I ended up ripping the damn thing out in the end. I tried 20 different prints with this probe, working on the z offet, changing the brass tip in the hot end, cleaned the bed twice and still very little adhesion. 1, just 1 of those prints worked after I'd spent hours troubleshooting.

However once I removed the 3D probe, flashed the firmware back to using a 3 x 3 manual mesh instead and levelled the bed again, suddenly I had adhesion. Good adhesion. Long prints suddenly started working again with minimal frustration. I could get back to my minis, my wife could print her projects. 

Maybe I didn't set it up correctly but after three days of wrestling with it, I'd had enough. The printer's working again and that's all we need right now..