Auto_Bed_Leveling: Enhanced G29 command

[brucehvn]

The only problem I have is that once I get my RAMPS flashed from Arduino and I have the perfect offset for my head's Z coordinate (.2mm gap when I issue a G1 Z0), every different slicer treats it differently. I've started an Excel sheet just to track it. I have to adjust the Z offset manually in each and every slicer. In a way it negates the time savings of having autolevel as I now spend an hour with each slicer tweaking the Z offset, testing a print, quitting it, adjusting again, printing, cancelling....you see where I'm going...until I have it. I was wondering why they don't read the configuration.h file correctly?

I wish I could settle on one slicer and be done with it but they all just have behaviors that are beneficial from job to job. I recently bought Simplyify3D and like it but I still get a cleaner print out of KissSlicer, the cleanest printing slicer I've every configured. So, I had Simplify3D all configured and had my Z offset manually tweaked and perfect and I go to print. Well, the print just wasn't clean. So, I stop and go back to Kisslicer. I find that the Z offset is not not correct so I spend an hour to get it correct and get a good print.

Sorry to meander, but my point is, until I can figure out a way to have ALL slicers trust the Z offset from the configuration.h file and know that all slicers will respect it, I'm not garnering any time savings with autolevel. I hope I can solve this as autolevel seems like it can "be the bomb." But for now, it's just as tedious as hand leveling the bed with corner bolts.

Ok, this doesn't sound right at all. Something else is going on with your system. How much do you need to tweak the Z offset? The slicer should just be setting the initial Z to whatever your first layer height is. So for instance, if your first layer height in slic3r is set to .4, then in the generated gcode, you should see it go to that height (G1 Z0.4) as the first G1 for printing. If you see that, then the slicer is doing what it is supposed to do. After flashing your ramps board, did you do the EEPROM commands to make sure you were using the firmware version of the settings, then save them to EEPROM again? If you don't do that, then the firmware won't automatically adjust your Z offset when issued G1 commands. I'm guessing you did the EEPROM thing, since you say you can issue a G1 Z0.

Also, usually we try to adjust for a .1mm gap (one paper sheet thickness)

Bruce