Introduction

Tired of using the finicky inbuilt leveling wizard on your printer, or maybe you don't even have one at all? Wish it was faster, slower, automatic, or just all around easier to use?. Well look no further this project has you covered.

Use the simple gcode generator to generate a gcode routine that automatically heats your bed/hotend and moves it to points around the bed so all you have to worry about is holding the paper/feeler gauge and adjusting the leveling knobs. Using the advanced option lets you set the hotend to move to each leveling point as slow or as fast as you'd like along with an array of other helpful settings to make a bed leveling wizard that works for you!

Instructions

The process is simple! Open the Routine_Generator.exe choose simple or advanced mode and follow the prompts to automatically generate a gcode routine to suit your needs, once it says "Successfully Generated Gcode!" simply go to the folder where you just ran Routine_Generator from and a file called Bed_Level_Routine.gcode will be waiting for you! Just pop it on an SD card, upload it to octoprint or send it via USB and prepare your paper for the easiest bed leveling experience of your life!

Better yet there are some included presets for printers located in the download that you can upload and print away!

Note: If you are having any trouble running the generator make sure you've extracted it out of the zip folder into downloads or documents for example.

Check out the great video by wam bam systems which inspired me to make this project and has a great tutorial on how he levels his printers using this system (well his own hand written gcode that does the same as my automatic routine generator): https://youtu.be/RJC7N4Vb9AY

Advanced Mode

Advanced mode offers you a wide range of settings to customize your leveling experience below will be a quick summary of what each setting does and remember you can always enter 0 to pick the default setting if you are unsure!

• Bed X - The build volume of your printer in the X direction (usually the direction your hotend moves in)
• Bed Y - The build volume of your printer in the Y direction (usually the direction your bed moves in
• Bed Temp - The temperature to preheat your bed to before the routine starts
• Hotend Temp - The temperature to preheat your hotend to before the routine starts
• Z Lift Height - How high your nozzle lifts up off the bed before moving between points
• Lift Speed - How fast the nozzle lifts up off the bed in mm/min, if you want to use mm/s simply multiply your desired mm/s by 60 to get mm/min
• Travel Speed - How fast the nozzle moves between points in mm/min, if you want to use mm/s simply multiply your desired mm/s by 60 to get mm/min
• XY Offset - This is a multiplier that determines how far away from the edge of the bed each test point is located, this is helpful as some printers such as the ender 3 have the nozzle sitting right on the corner of the bed at X0 making it very hard to level. an XY Offset of 0.2 moves each point in from the edge by 10%, on the ender 3 this means the test points will be 45mm in from the edges of the bed
• Center - This simply determines whether or not the nozzle will move to the center of the bed after moving to each 4 corners, although you don't really do any leveling in the center it's helpful as a reference to see if the bed center is at the right height as some beds aren't perfectly flat. A value of 0 will enable the center point and a value of 1 will disable it
• Home - This determines if the routine will home before moving to any of the test points, it's strongly suggested to leave this enabled (0). A value of 0 will enable the center point and a value of 1 will disable it
• Passes - How many times the routine will loop through each test point, I'd suggest using at least 6 as each time you level one corner it slightly offsets the other corners so it's helpful to go through multiple times until you are only adjusting each corner about 1/10 of a turn. Personally I like to do 12 passes.
• Wait Time - How long the hotend will wait at the test point for you to adjust the bed level knobs in seconds
• Wait Time Speedup - How much the wait time will be decreased by after each pass, this is helpful as the more passes you do the more accurate each corner will become and thus less adjustment of the knobs is needed. This value has to be in whole seconds as of the current version

Licensing And Source Code

The source code is included and everything is licensed under creative commons - share alike. I highly encourage anyone who actually knows how to program to help improve and un-jank my code, everything was written in c++ in notepad++ and compiled with minGW on windows and gcc on linux.

Compiling from source

If you don't trust some random on the internet (which you shouldn't) and want to compile from source simple compile Routine_Generator.cpp. it requires no special libraries and should be portable to other systems, I've compiled and included the linux and windows binaries but feel free to compile mac, openBSD, ect. versions, heck it might even run on an atmega chip with a bit of modification.

Windows Defender Smartscreen

Because this program doesn't have any form of "reputation" with with windows smart screen it's going to complain with an error that goes something like "Windows protected your pc, blah blah, unrecognized app". The ammount of people who are going to download this will make applying for malware analysis from microsoft pointless so just click "run anyway" or if you don't feel comfortable feel free to compile form source :)

Feedback

Please feel free to leave comments and feedback and I'll try my best to help, I'm also open to any improvement ideas and I'd love to know if anyone found this useful

Credits

Thanks to wam bam systems (psdesign) for his great tutorial which inspired me to create a program to allow anyone to use any printer to level their bed using his method

Icon for the windows exe is from https://flaticons.net/

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