Love the podcast. You guys speculated on what the array of strain sensors and LIDAR does for the hands free bed leveling on the Creality K1. I can't speak for the K1, but I have been using a Bambu X1 Carbon and can tell you what I observe.
The Bambu X1 spends 7 minutes before it starts a print going through the filament loading, nozzle cleaning, vibration resonance testing, flow calibration, and hands free bed leveling, The bed leveling is a two step process. First it taps the nozzle to the bed in 25 places. The bed has 3 ceramic force sensors used to detect contact with the nozzle (
https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/x1/maintenance/replace-the-heatbed-force-sensor) . Then it uses the LIDAR to scan the bed only where the print will be on the bed surface. I suspect the LIDAR scan of where the print will appear is also used for comparison to the LIDAR scan during the first layer inspection.
- Dual automated bed leveling for doubly guaranteed prints.
- Bambu Lab X1 utilizes two sets of independent sensors and an algorithm to measure the height of the nozzle relative to the bed.
- The lidar and analog force sensors crosscheck for an extra layer of redundancy in bed leveling.
The Creality K1 web page is probably alluding to a similar process.
The first layer I get with the X1 even for really large X-Y geometries is always beautiful. So however they do it, it works really well. You can see the Z lead screws adjust the bed during the print as the head traverses in X-Y to keep the bed at the exact distance from the nozzle.