A couple of months ago I picked up Creality’s newest machine the Ender 3. Right out of the box it was a

great machine and I knew I was going to make it one of my main work horses for orders. I have been

very impressed with the print quality from day one so that is not something that I am going to be worrying

about or modding on this machine.

However, I did want to add auto bed leveling to the machine. I have used proximity sensors before but

never a BlTouch. So I decided that was the route I wanted to go with this machine. It was quite a process

to get this working on the Ender 3 so I wanted to share what goes into it to hopefully safe you some time

and frustration if this is something that you decide you want to do to your machine.

Before anything else, you will need to flash a bootloader to your Ender 3. I did make a tutorial that can be

found here on how to do this. On that hardware side you will need a mount. I did find one for the CR-10

that was close to working on the Ender 3 so I modified it a bit to work. I have uploaded the mount and it

can be downloaded here.

As far as wiring goes, this took quite a lot of work. I had never wired one of these before so I was already

unsure of how to do it. The majority of my time went into searching the web for some sort of pinout on

the board or diagram to help me see where I could grab power and signal from to allow the BlTouch

servo to work. Well I finally did end up finding a diagram on a Spanish website that gave me what I

needed to move forward with this.

I have edited the diagram slightly and it can be found below. I ended up splicing the ribbon cable for the

LCD and taking the signal for the buzzer to control signal sent to the BlTouch. Once you have done the

mount and the wiring the last thing to do is flash over custom Marlin for the Ender 3 with the BlTouch

enabled.

I started out by flashing TH3 Studio’s universal firmware but that did not give me what I needed. The

flashing went well but I could only seem to install bed leveling if I was using his EZABL which was not

something I wanted to do. So I was forced to download a clean coppy of Marlin off of Github and do all of

the configuring myself.

I have not had to do this in well over a year so it was very tedious and time consuming. However, in the

end I have an Ender 3 with a BlTouch installed that has been printing beautifully for at least a month now

with perfect first layers. I will go ahead and save you the pain and upload my version of Marlin that can

be found here. Now if you want to use the same setup as me you can just flash it over without having to

manually do all of the configuration.

Hoping this will help some of you. It will be very similar for the Ender 2 as well and my Marlin file might

be a good starting point on that.

If your Z offset after flashing over my version of Marlin to your Ender 3 is not where you want it, I found a great video guide on how to adjust it here.

Hoping this will help save at least a good chunk of time for those that want to do this upgrade.

This is definitely an awesome upgrade that was worth the time.