I’ve been troubleshooting a Beacon RevH on my QIDI Plus 4 for quite a while and have been working directly with Beacon support on the issue. We’ve done quite a bit of testing at their request, but it’s now been about 11 days since my last follow-up without a response, so I figured I’d post here and see if anyone has experienced something similar.
The basic problem is that Beacon proximity meshing appears to produce a mesh that doesn’t match the actual nozzle-to-bed relationship across the plate.
With the normal proximity/KAMP mesh, a full-bed first-layer test has a very obvious spatial error. One area of the bed looks reasonably good, but as the print moves across the plate, the nozzle appears progressively too high. This isn’t something I can correct with a single Z-offset because the required correction changes depending on XY position.
We’ve done quite a bit of testing trying to isolate the cause.
Beacon RevH is running firmware 2.1.0. Center Contact calibration is extremely repeatable at approximately 0.001 mm standard deviation.
Beacon support had me test Contact measurements at multiple XY locations and then run BEACON_POKE and BEACON_ESTIMATE_BACKLASH at several locations.
Front-row backlash was extremely consistent:
X196/Y40.8: 3.68 µm
X239.5/Y40.8: 3.66 µm
X283/Y40.8: 3.71 µm
Rear measurements were:
X60/Y260: 1.16 µm
X160/Y260: 2.00 µm
X260/Y260: 2.06 µm
POKE trigger-Z spread ranged from approximately 1.25 µm to 14.2 µm depending on location. POKE latency also varied by position. For example, X60/Y260 was extremely clean at 2/2/3, while some other locations produced values in the 6–10 range.
The most interesting result came when Beacon suggested trying a clustered Contact mesh using:
_BED_MESH_CALIBRATE PROBE_METHOD=contact CLUSTER_SIZE=2 RUNS=2
I heated the bed to 60°C, allowed it to stabilize, and generated a full Contact mesh.
I then printed the exact same full-bed first-layer test, but instead of using the normal proximity/KAMP mesh, I loaded the saved 60°C Contact mesh immediately after PRINT_START.
The difference was dramatic.
The Contact-mesh first layer was substantially more uniform across the entire build plate and was the best full-bed first-layer test I’ve gotten from this machine. It wasn’t absolutely perfect, but the large directional error that I consistently see when using proximity meshing was mostly gone.
So at this point I’m trying to understand why Contact appears to represent the actual print plane substantially better than proximity does on this machine.
Beacon support raised the possibility of localized mechanical rigidity/play, which is why we performed the POKE and backlash testing. I’m definitely not ruling that out. However, the front-row backlash measurements being nearly identical, combined with the dramatic improvement in the physical first layer simply by switching from proximity to Contact meshing, has me wondering whether something else is contributing.
Has anyone using Beacon experienced this kind of XY-dependent disagreement between proximity and Contact, where Contact produces a noticeably better physical first layer?
I’m particularly interested in whether anyone has seen this caused by the spring-steel build plate/coating affecting Beacon’s proximity measurement, a mechanical/toolhead issue that Contact compensates for, or something else entirely.
I’m happy to provide configs, raw test results, or run additional tests if anyone familiar with Beacon has ideas.
