Sensor Types
If you have ever looked up what ABL sensor to get for your printer most people will be talking about our EZABL VS the BL Touch. We designed our EZABL to be a more reliable competitor to the BL Touch as well as a sensor that includes technical support in case you are not an expert (or you don’t want to spend hours on forums/discord/groups).
The BL Touch is a probe that has a physical pin and a hall-effect sensor that is used to read the bed. The BL Touch deploys the pin before the printer probes and the pin is retracted on contact with the surface. This process is repeated over and over again until the probing is complete. Our EZABL, on the other hand, is fully solid-state and has no moving parts.
This post is just covering what we feel is one of the most important factors on a sensor because a 3D printer has many things (stepper motors, heater lines, fan lines) on it that can introduce electrical interference (aka EMI) into the sensor lines. When we designed our EZABL Pro we wanted to make sure that we could mitigate that as much as possible by using very high-quality shielded cable so that the EMI stays out of the sensor lines.
Why shielding?
It’s very simple, it improves accuracy and mitigates issues with accuracy that could be caused by EMI on the lines. If there is too much interference it could make your control board read the signal too early/too late, thus reducing accuracy.
You can also further mitigate interference at the firmware level by having heaters, fans, and/or motors turn off during probing but this does not always remove all interference. Many of these cheaper printers come with low-end power supplies that also introduce interference to the power lines. This is one of the reasons our EZABL also has onboard power filtering on the control board to smooth out incoming power to our sensor.
Wire Gauge, Type, Consistency
Our EZABL uses 24awg COPPER wire. We do not use Copper Clad Aluminum wire (which is cheaper and weaker) for our sensor cables. The wire also has strands of fibers built into the cable itself to provide for extra resistance against strain on the cable. Because we are the only ones who make and sell the EZABL we are able to guarantee that all the EZABL cables are up to our standards and consistent from batch to batch. We also include a 1.5 Meter cable with ALL kits, BL Touch kits all vary based on the reseller and what they decide to include for wire length.
BL Touch on the other hand can vary widely because they sell their sensors bare to other companies and they make their own harnesses. This leads to confusion with users because of differences in colors that companies use as well as highly varying wire gauges and quality. We’ve seen BL Touch cables with wire gauges ranging from 24AWG down to 26AWG. This smaller wire gauge is fine but coupled with no shielding can result in poor performance. Some BL Touch users have even gone as far as to spend extra money purchasing separate shielding to apply to their cables to mitigate interference issues.
Detailed Pictures of the Cables
These are pictures of our EZABL cable and a cable for a BL Touch from a Creality printer. Most BL Touch cables are the same wire gauge as shown and include no shielding. Do note that because many vendors resell and bundle the BL Touch with their printers the type of cable you get with a BL Touch may vary from what is shown here.
Closing
We posted this because many ask us about our EZABL and why we feel it is better than a BL Touch. The wiring is one main thing and we wanted to highlight this as we’ve very proud of it. We hope you enjoyed this little write-up and if you want to pick up your own EZABL kit, click the link below. 🙂
