Coming from a world of Ender 3 machines, I’m use to using wheel locks, ABL and mesh leveling where once I dial it in, I don’t touch it again until something goes wrong. With the ECC I thought the same would apply but the few prints I did where I didn’t do the auto level first, the nozzle was too close and scrapped along the bed. Wondering if people have had a similar experience? I was only using the textured side of the bed and didn’t make any changes in the slicer. Side not, if you want to use the other side (B-smooth) you have to change the elegoo slicer setting to bed type, cool smooth plate. Took me way to long to figure that out.
Yes, modern printers running Marlin do support just probing the print area. My trusty old Prusa Mk3s probes the whole bed regardless, but the Bambu A1 mini next to it will do zone probing for small sized prints. I don’t know about Klipper, but I’m sure if you understand the config files, you should be able to do it there too.
If you noticed when the Mk4 auto leveled, it waited until the bed was hot and at temperature. The reason for this is that when you heat the bed, it changes shape. And what was once level is no longer level or at least a different level. And most Ender 3 users always leveled cold and only at the corners. Then they often had issues printing in various interior spots on the bed.
You do use an ABL on occasions, and it works for you. So I ain’t going to tell you to stop. But that’s why every modern printer I know of does auto leveling before printing. It tries to ensure the user will always have the best chance at success.
Yeah I always preheat the bed for an extra 5 minutes or so before probing, but it waits for the bed heating in my prefix gcode anyway, bed warping is real.
I’m going to look into a newer marlin and zone probing. Really, I’d like to look into the carbon clonescand jump to the newer technologies, but I literally just found this community and might use it to get restarted.