This is the story of a recent failure of mine. Nobody was hurt an nothing was broken, but it was humiliating and a big waste of my time.

Anyone who has calibrated a delta 3D printer with the manual method knows how tedious it can be. After setting up a bed probe on my printer, a process I discuss in my previous two blog posts, I wanted to automate this calibration by commanding my printer through Python. I wasted my time.

I recently designed my own custom extruder for my printer, and have since thrown it out and reinstalled the stock one. But why would I want a custom extruder in the first place?

Every 3D printing enthusiast knows that the first layer of a print is the most important. All the subsequent layers are built on top of this one, and its adhesion to the bed is what holds the entire print in place. Modern printers often use bed probes to compensate for slightly warped beds and to achieve a perfect first layer every time.