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I don't know the trick laser FSR adaptor plate but there is a bit about various ways people have used piezo discs in the following message on the RepRap forum http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?1,635 ... msg-771134 also others scattered through that fairly lengthy thread.

Mike

I have now been using piezo discs on both of my printers for over a year now and they have proven completely reliable. What problems there were were easy to diagnose and correct. Since that time DjDemonD in the U.K. and ECJ in Brazil have independently developed piezo Z probes attached to hotends an...

The brass with its ceramic coating seems to blunt ordinary drills after only a couple of tries. Tungsten carbide drills are much better but 4.5mm carbide drill bits are quite expensive. The best method I found was to mount them on a bit of plastic in a lathe and use a small end mill bit in a rotary ...

As far as mechanical sensitivity goes, I think that I can show you just how bad or good it gets. Picture below is of a probe pushing on a 20mm piezo disk as speeds from 0.5mm/sec to 3mm/sec. The ripples are from the stepper motor and reach resonance on the second trace (1mm/sec) where each wiggle is...

Having worked for many years in product design I know that many initial designs are well received but turn out to have fatal flaws that even some bright cookies were unable to see. Somewhere between one in three and one in ten designs reach production - and the market even then may not be interested...

My experience with piezo disks sounds the same as yours with FSRs, rock solid and reliable. It is hard to make any more claims than that as there is only a tiny declared user base, 4 to 6 people but all of those say only good things about them. In the real world there must be some people who have tr...

Have you looked at FSRs? They are an excellent solution that work under a wide variety of conditions, reliably. There is no reason why an effector/carriage couldn't be designed with an FSR rather than a piezoelectric sensor. But, on to your question, yes F1800 and that is at the low end. The stock ...

I have only just found this thread and have been reading it with some fascination as it is possible that accelerometers probes may be a way of solving the sensitivity to mechanical noise that piezoelectric disk sensors suffer from. One thing that does concern me though is that a probe speed of F1800...

The use of piezoelectric disks on Delta printers has moved on a lot in the past couple of months. DjDemonD on the RepRap forum has developed a Z contact sensor which is fitted in the effector while Lykle has a new effector design to incorporate DjDemonD's sensor. The ongoing forum thread is at http:...

The hot end is my own design, the pipe carries air from a positive displacement pump to cool the print very soon after the new filament has been deposited. This does work but I am presently exploring using a perforated ring similar to the "Berd Air" design. Picture below shows a cross sect...

I found paper to be too porous. Although I have done few tests to date, polyester OHP film with grease around the edge seems able to hold a vacuum for some hours without any external vacuum reservoir.

A vacuum to hold down a build stage offers the possibility of using very thin films to build prints on; this film can be sacrificial if cheap enough. I have done some early trials with a vacuum table that I have fitted to my Delta printer and first tests have been very encouraging. I put a video on ...

A quick update to the progress with using cheap piezo disks as Z contact sensors for automatic bed leveling. As hoped for, the Rostock printer has not suffered from the cross-talk from X and Y movement that needed a reduction in sensitivity on my Cartesian printer. The trip point on the comparator i...

I have put some photos and a CAD rendering on the "Show us your machine" section.

Mike

I was quite surprised to find that I have very few photographs of my printers, I seem to have taken many more of the various parts and have cad renerings of just about everything I have tried. First photo is my second Prusa Mendel type named Caliban. Caliban has just been completely rebuilt and is m...

@Xenocrates, Repetier firmware ignores zeroing inputs other than when expected, but the sensitivity is the biggest problem as the printer still shakes after an XY move and the present mount system has lots of crosstalk from the X & Y channels. The obvious answer is to have a delay between an X o...

Does anybody know of any problems that there may be with using Piezoelectric disks for bed leveling that I may have missed? It seem a bit unlikely that something as good as this seems not to have had any attention. To give a bit of background: When I was checking out bed leveling technologies I came...

Hi, Just to introduce myself. I have several assorted 3D printers including a Rostock that I made from Johann's thingiverse data in April 2012. This is presently undergoing a full rebuild with Piezoelectric disk Z contact sensing for bed leveling and magnetic ball couplings. Other printers are a cou...