Thanks to a brilliant little trick designed by a poster in our forums, who goes by 1013, you can now modify your LulzBot to automatically prove and level your heatbed. Working off a feature that was already present in Marlin firmware, 1013 designed and added a small retractable probe for the hot end and then wrote in some extra GCode to get it running. We start with this, which is written into Marlin:
G29-G32: Bed probing G29 Detailed Z-Probe probes the bed at 3 points. G30 Single Z Probe probes bed at current XY location. G31 Report Current Probe status reports whether Z probe is triggered. G32 Probe Z and calibrate with FPU probes the bed at 3 points and updates transformation matrix for bed leveling compensation
From there, 1013 designed the retractable probe and an anti-backlash Z-nut and motor to M6 couplers (which, he points out, are needed to make the Z-probing compensation accurate). Both objects can be found and downloaded on Thingiverse. His original post also includes a download link to the custom GCode he wrote, which can be loaded directly into Slic3r. That can be found here. And just in case the technical jargon isn't enough to get you going - or if you're the kind of person who likes to see things in action before trying them out yourself - here's an awesome video from 1013 that shows the mod at work.
We say bravo, 1013! Thank you for your contribution - we love it! Don't forget to head over to the LulzBot Forums to catch more exciting new user-submitted mods and info... and, of course, feel free to add your own.