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Bambu Lab A1 Mini

bambulab.com

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Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#21

Post by wilg »

postalrat wrote: post #6
dthakur wrote: post #3

The interview[1] between Bambu Lab's CEO and Stefan from the CNC Kitchen YouTube channel has some details about the company's background and strategy. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pFtbybLlk0

Their strategy seems to be make a profit by taking everything they can from the community while milking their users. Do everything they can to lock people into their cloud and ecosystem.

Their strategy is to make a good printer and allow you to easily use it. Also, the "cloud" thing is not paid or anything its just a way to send files to the printer over the internet and watch the built-in camera from your telephone. You can also just put files on an SD card or whatever and print them.

There are one zillion other companies making super hackable 3D printers or whatever if you want that.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#22

Post by sottol »

This is a very interesting printer:

* the toolhead/nozzle quick-change is pretty fantastic and quite ingenius, you change nozzle and heatsink thereby guaranteeing good heat dissipation but the thermistor and heater stay put,

* the MMU seems to be able to handle many more types of spools due to center-mounting as opposed to edge-rolling and they reduced retraction distance substantially.

The noise cancellation seems a bit gimicky just like the LIDAR on the X1C.

The Makerworld integration goes a step further than most other 3D-printing-hub-websites by slicing the models and being to print immediately without having to fuss with a slicer. Should be a lot more beginner-friendly.

It does look like they're taking a page or two from the DJI playbook (not surprising, CEO and others being ex-employees). DJI went from solid drones just a tad above what hoobyists could build, like the early Phantoms, to improving video+link-reliabilty with later phantoms to crazy integration of everything in the newer Mavic and especially Minis that are way beyond hobbyist's possibilities.

I am somewhat doubtful that the exact strategy of tight integration of hardware components will work for 3D printers. After it probably won't matter if one printer is slightly smaller than another.

But they do seem to do more software/hardware integration which could be very welcome for beginners and those not in it for the tinkering, as well as their focus on reliability. Their AMS MMU systems seem to be a step above all others in terms of reliability and ease-of-use.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#23

Post by bmitc »

yumraj wrote: post #11

Priced close to Prusa Mini+, with same print dimensions (18cm x 18cm x 18cm) but multi color. What’s the general review of this company? Are these any good or are there more like Ender and other cheap Chinese printers?

I have been really wanting to get a Bambu Lab printer, but the last time I checked, they didn't support offline printing very well. Keywords: last time I checked. I haven't circled back in the last half year or so.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#24

Post by mmastrac »

jLaForest wrote: post #17
yumraj wrote: post #11

Priced close to Prusa Mini+, with same print dimensions (18cm x 18cm x 18cm) but multi color. What’s the general review of this company? Are these any good or are there more like Ender and other cheap Chinese printers?

A few weeks ago their mandatory cloud printing service had a bug and caused printers to spontaneously crash in the middle of the night, in many cases doing significant damage to the printer. Other than that Bambu had a pretty good reputation.

I hadn't heard of this company or that story but it was wild

https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/15sfisq/bambula...

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#26

Post by dotnet00 »

postalrat wrote: post #20
burritosnob wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are they "taking everything from the community"? You mean researching user feedback on other printers and building a better product? I have owned a dozen or so printers over the last decade going back to PrintrBot. As with a lot of users, the BambuLabs X1 was hands down the best out the box experience of any printer I own. It continues to be my go to printer while my other Prusa's + Creality's sit idle. As long a…

I heard the same arguments for the Ender printers when they were popular. Best prints ever, incredible detail, etc, etc. At least Ender wasn't actively trying to trap people into their ecosystem. It won't work though. The clones are coming. Many companies have tried to get the cloud lock-in but it just doesn't make sense to buy in as a user.

As an example, Creality giving in and open sourcing the K1 (their clone of Bambu's tech) after initially going as far as violating the license on Klipper to push their own cloud system.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#27

Post by yumraj »

jLaForest wrote: post #17
yumraj wrote: post #11

Priced close to Prusa Mini+, with same print dimensions (18cm x 18cm x 18cm) but multi color. What’s the general review of this company? Are these any good or are there more like Ender and other cheap Chinese printers?

A few weeks ago their mandatory cloud printing service had a bug and caused printers to spontaneously crash in the middle of the night, in many cases doing significant damage to the printer. Other than that Bambu had a pretty good reputation.

> mandatory cloud printing service

Do I have to use it? Or is it possible to run without it and just lose some feature I may not even need. You said mandatory so I’m assuming the answer is no.

Unfortunately if that’s the case, it’s an absolute no no for me.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#28

Post by techdragon »

jLaForest wrote: post #17
yumraj wrote: post #11

Priced close to Prusa Mini+, with same print dimensions (18cm x 18cm x 18cm) but multi color. What’s the general review of this company? Are these any good or are there more like Ender and other cheap Chinese printers?

A few weeks ago their mandatory cloud printing service had a bug and caused printers to spontaneously crash in the middle of the night, in many cases doing significant damage to the printer. Other than that Bambu had a pretty good reputation.

The cloud isn’t mandatory, it’s just necessary for some features and on by default…

That’s not the same as mandatory. I agree it’s kind of annoying and I don’t like how it’s Wi-Fi only either … but my X1Carbon is the first 3d printer after years of tinkering where I genuinely want another one instead of some other printer that’s very similar but does x, y, or z better because it’s kinda shit on the one I just got.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#29

Post by userbinator »

function_seven wrote: post #4

EDIT: After some more poking around, I’m finding out that the cloud features of this thing are pretty integral to the experience. This thing looks nice, but the enshittification scaffolding is too much. I knew the price was too good. ORIGINAL COMMENT: Wow, I've been out of the 3D printing world for a bit. I have a Monoprice Maker Ultimate (Wanhao D6, rebadged) that has a slightly larger build area, but otherwise it's…

It's no surprise that what's been making 2D printing an increasingly horrible experience has also started showing up in 3D too.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#30

Post by patrec »

jLaForest wrote: post #17
yumraj wrote: post #11

Priced close to Prusa Mini+, with same print dimensions (18cm x 18cm x 18cm) but multi color. What’s the general review of this company? Are these any good or are there more like Ender and other cheap Chinese printers?

A few weeks ago their mandatory cloud printing service had a bug and caused printers to spontaneously crash in the middle of the night, in many cases doing significant damage to the printer. Other than that Bambu had a pretty good reputation.

From their post-mortem: https://blog.bambulab.com/cloud-temporary-outage-investigati...

> The result was that the print job was successfully completed on the printer, but our cloud service believed it had not been done. When service resumed, the once-jammed job was resent, leading to the unexpected printing of an already finished job.

That's why you make message sends in a distributed system idempotent, unless you have a really excellent reason not to. Whatever generated the print job when the user pressed “print” should have generated a unique job id, and when the printer was resent the same job id it should just have replied “Done”.

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