Independent Lifting Printheads
If you take a close look at our product, you may notice an interesting detail: a small sliding rail mounted behind each printhead of the L4. That’s right, our printheads have a unique design that every single printhead can lift up and down independently by about 5 millimeters.
So why did we develop this lifting printhead design, even though it seemingly makes each printhead bulkier?
Before diving into the reasoning, let’s walk through the core challenge we faced.
The biggest challenge was bed leveling. With just one printhead, the process is straightforward: a virtual Bed Mesh can be generated easily through mesh probing. However, integrating four separate printheads drastically complicates the whole process.
While we engineer all four printheads to sit at an identical nominal height during production, manufacturing tolerances, assembly deviations and other variables come into play.
In reality, the actual Z-height coordinates of the four printheads never perfectly match, which triggers a wide range of print quality defects. We therefore needed a reliable method to ensure all printheads operate at the exact same Z-axis height when printing.
Our first prototype solution split the heated bed into four individually adjustable quadrants. This design allowed for more compact printheads and was technically simpler to implement, yet it brought a major usability flaw. If users wanted to print models larger than one-quarter of the bed surface area, they would have to swap in a full-size PEI sheet. This obvious inconvenience ruined the overall user experience.
After multiple rounds of design iteration, we landed on the independent lifting printhead system. When calibrating the first print layer, printhead T0 first completes the full BedMesh probing routine. The remaining three printheads then perform origin offset detection one after another, measuring their respective Z-axis height offsets relative to T0. The built-in lifting mechanism on each printhead automatically compensates for these height discrepancies.
Once all printhead Z-offsets are calibrated, the first layer printing begins. Instead of the conventional method that adjusts the entire heated bed for mesh compensation, our system counteracts surface irregularities by dynamically lifting or lowering individual printheads during the initial printing layers.
This calibration method has undergone extensive real-world testing, delivering performance that far exceeded our expectations.
