Bought bltouch & mini ir, no luck yet...

I have bought both the blTouch and Mini IR and have not managed to get either one working. I'll tell you what I've done so far and where I am at right now.

The blTouch uses 5 wires, 3 to the servos, 2 to the endstop. I have installed pins so that I can use the servos that were missing pins. There are 4 +, -, and S pins. In order to supply powers to these pins, I have shorted out the 5v and VCC pins that were near. After that, I messed around with the firmware and never did get the bltouch working.

Now I've reset the firmware on my printer by uploading the latest version of Marlin and overwriting the configuration.h with the Robo 3D R1+ example supplied by Marlin.

Then I bought the mini IR and receive it today. It only comes with 3 wires. Since the endstop pins only contain 2, I hooked them up to the 3 servo pins instead-but when I power the printer on, the Mini IR red light just constantly flickers and nothing else happens.

It doesn't look like there is much to change in the firmware for the Mini IR, but since I'm not using the endstop pins, should I need to tell the Firmware to use the Servo pins instead? I don't know enough about this subject.

I know I'm doing something wrong to fail at installing both of these devices, any ideas?

 

Does the BLTouch LED come on?

BLTouch manual has Marlin firmware changes that need to be made.

 

Thanks, RoboRage. The light does come on. It will even self-test at boot. What it would not do is push out the pin on z homing or follow any other commands like self-test sent from the LCD screen. I do recall making several firmware changes in an attempt to get it working but ran out of ideas and decided to try the IR instead. I don't really care which one works at this point.

 

Do you have the R1+ with the black shield?

 

It is the R1+, but black shield? The shell is white, the plate is black glass, the ramps board is black. The middle block that mounts the plate rails is black. Sorry, not sure what you're referring to so I just listed as many black things as I could.

 

Sorry, the Ramps board is referred to as an Arduino Shield.

Ill post my config files up when I get home later. Should work for you.

 

Attached is the Config file I'm using with Marlin 2.0.9.2. I use Arduino IDE 1.8.16 for compiling and uploading.

I did make 2 changes for the E3D V6 hot end, but that should have no effect on your setup.

 

Thank you for that.

I plugged the bltouch back up. Black and white plug on z endstop pins. White to the outside, black matches the same orientation as the other red/black pairs for the endstops). I plugged the other 3 pin plug into one of the sets of servo pins, does it matter which set of pins I use? Yellow to S, red to +, and brown to -.

Was there anything in the advanced config worth changing?

I loaded it up but it still didn't work for me. The red light comes on the bltouch and stays on. The pin comes in and out twice and that's it. It doesn't respond to the LCD screen request for self-test or deploy.

Please don't assume I know anything, lol.

 

I did what this guy did although I had to solder in the missing pins.

Start at 1:30

 

What does your Gcode look like? Does it have this in the beginning to home the axes and probe the bed?

G90
G28 ; Home all axes
G29 ; Probe the bed - 4x4 grid

 

I used the same video. Watched it again just to make sure. The only difference is I'm not using servo 0 as he did. I haven't even gotten to the gcode yet because when I ask my printer to z home from the LCD screen, it doesn't activate the bltouch and won't stop unless I halt the printer before it reaches the bottom and breaks something.

 

I think you have to use Servo 0 or you'll need to change the ramps pin file in Marlin.

Can you change to Servo 0?

 

That did it. Thank you, man.