Anet a8 Plus BlTouch

Hey, sup!

The top picture speaks for itself. Today we will talk about how to correctly install BlTouch for Anet A8 Plus 3D Printer. BlTouch is the sensor designed for auto leveling the bed of the 3D printer. There are a lot of information about Anet A8 (without plus) printer on the net but it's hard to find information for its newest model (plus). So to save you couple of hours time in researching how to correctly connect the wires, i will show the proof of concept how to do it in correct way.

Necessary stuff:

• Anet A8 Plus 3D printer
• BlTouch or 3Dtouch (the wiring of these are the same)
• Printed handler for BlTouch use "BL Touch Mount - direct mounting v2.stl"
• 20 prototyping jumper male-female gpio wires from RaspberryPI projects
• USB Printer cable

Hardware setup

You will need to print a BlTouch holder for your printer, like this one (which this tutorial is based on).

You will need additional 25mm M3 screw. Then you need to make measurement of space between bltouch and the nozzle, in my setup it's 5.2cm (52mm). 

Wiring

The hard way of this tutorial is wiring. Please be care-full to not damage board or the cables you handle. You will have to connect five cables from bltouch to the printer main board. As mainboard does not have additional space for connecting them, you have to connect them using separate cables on ports LCD and J3. We will use these type of prototyping cables to extend original cables and use one wire from each original slot setup for our modification. Because there is one unused pin on each of these ports. Also we will override the default socket of Z-S (z-stop) and connect other 3 cables on there.

Yeah it sees as a mess, but it's actually quite easy to setup. Just use this wiring scheme.

Just be sure about your board version and where to connect orange cable (depending on the board version). The screen at the bottom only works for the v1.5 of the board, for the 1.7 version you need to connect orange wire to the pin 7.

Software setup

Make sure your printer is powered off, then connect your printer to your computer using usb cable.

The following setup have been done on Mac, but on other operating systems it will be very similar.

Download the newest Marlin 2.x from https://marlinfw.org/meta/download/

Download the printer definitionus from https://github.com/SkyNet3D/anet-board

Download Arduino studio from https://www.arduino.cc/en/software

Now insert the definitions into the place

mv anet-board/hardware/anet /Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Java/hardware

Open Arduino IDE in Meniu Tools > Boards > Marlin AVR Boards should show up the menu entries Anet v1.0 and Anet v1.0 (Optiboot)

Now we should to download the definitions for the marlin

cd marlin-src/config

cat README.md (url to the definitions)

wget <url to definitions>

unzip release*.zip

cd Configurations-release-*

mv config/examples/Anet/A8plus/* ../../Marlin 

Open Marlin/marlin.ino with Arduino IDE

Click Sketch -> Include Library, Click Manage libraries

1. Download and Install u8glib by oliver

    * Click Sketch -> Include Library, Click Manage libraries

    * Search U8glib – U8Glib by oliver,

    * Click Install

    * Click Close

2. Click Tools -> Board, Select Anet 1.0 (Optiboot)

3. Click Port, Select the assigned COM port

Marlin configuration

Search for these lines and comment them with //

//#define ANET_FULL_GRAPHICS_LCD

//#define ENDSTOP_INTERRUPTS_FEATURE

//#define MIN_SOFTWARE_ENDSTOP_Z 

// #define SDSUPPORT 

Search for these lines and uncomment/adjust them:

#define CR10_STOCKDISPLAY

#define BLTOUCH

#define NOZZLE_TO_PROBE_OFFSET { 0, 52, 0 }

#define PROBING_MARGIN 30

#define AUTO_BED_LEVELING_BILINEAR

#define ENABLE_LEVELING_FADE_HEIGHT

#define EXTRAPOLATE_BEYOND_GRID

#define LCD_BED_LEVELING

#define Z_SAFE_HOMING

 

In Configuration_adv.h uncomment these lines

#define Z_SAFE_HOMING

#define BLTOUCH_FORCE_SW_MODE

If you are using BlTouch v3.1 you can also try enabling #define BLTOUCH_SET_5V_MODE

As you see we had to disable SD card support, therefore you must be running OctoPrint already. Because without SD card and OctoPrint support you can only directly print from computer using usb cable. Search internet how to make OctoPrint to work if you haven't already.

Now press upload. Updated software should reboot the board, you can disconnect it from your computer and normally power it on. If you see only blank screen something must be wrong, you should reconnect original cables and try turning it on, if it works that means that you have bad wiring. If your printer does not work or show blank screen on all ways you tried, it seems that you have corrupted BootLoader on the board. Without USBasp you will not be able to fix it.

Probe Z Offset

Follow this youtube tutorial.

You must be finished by now. If you have any questions please post a comment. :)