Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bambu Lab A1 Mini

bambulab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 149 posts

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#61

Post by antirez »

margor wrote: post #57
antirez wrote: post #46

This looks much better than it actually is for a couple of reasons: - Multicolor is not something you actually use often and is horribly slow. Slow like in a 2 hours print becomes 12 hours print if it's colored. And it wastes a lot of plastic (and doing so does a lot of noise, too). - The printer can't print things like ASA. Limited to PLA/PETG/TPU. - While the design of the hotend and swappable nozzle looks nice at…

> Also Bambulab has a bad track in providing parts, when needed. Sorry but do you have any sources for that? I'm just looking at their website[0] and I see all the common parts available - what exactly is missing with parts they provide? [0] https://eu.store.bambulab.com/collections/accessories-for-x1...

I'm in many Reddit / Facebook groups about 3D printers and a lot of people complain constantly. So I've only this kind of evidence, other than a single friend that confirmed issues with getting parts.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#62

Post by margor »

bmitc wrote: post #23
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.

LAN printing (i.e. offline) works now without much issues :) disclaimer: Happy X1C owner

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#63

Post by antirez »

nullc wrote: post #60
antirez wrote: post #46

This looks much better than it actually is for a couple of reasons: - Multicolor is not something you actually use often and is horribly slow. Slow like in a 2 hours print becomes 12 hours print if it's colored. And it wastes a lot of plastic (and doing so does a lot of noise, too). - The printer can't print things like ASA. Limited to PLA/PETG/TPU. - While the design of the hotend and swappable nozzle looks nice at…

> Multicolor is not something you actually use often and is horribly slow. Slow like in a 2 hours print becomes 12 hours print if it's colored. on the X1C multi-color is less bad if you fill the bed with copies since the switch time gets amortized across many parts. So your print takes 13 hours but now you get six copies. Although with a smaller bed on the A1 mini that will help less.

True. But multicolor is often used for miniatures or alike. Who needs 4 magic creatures? If it's for an Etsy shop, then things are different and your point is a lot more valid.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#64

Post by deng »

Good review by Maker's Muse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8sdrPgH9Fk

tldw; Printer has great build quality for the price. Print quality and speed obviously below the bigger Bambu machines, but excellent for a "bed slinger". Print volume quite small and requires diagonal placing for bigger parts. Pretty much PLA-only, but TPU also possible if fed directly into extruder. The multi-filament solution has serious drawbacks: filament change extremely slow and generates lots of "poop" plastic, which is simply discarded to the side of the printer. All in all: great printer for beginners, but the multi-filament is more of a gimmick.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#65

Post by bmitc »

margor wrote: post #62
bmitc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LAN printing (i.e. offline) works now without much issues :) disclaimer: Happy X1C owner

Were there some particular updates recently? Thanks for the heads up. I'll look into this again.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#66

Post by jrockway »

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…

Yeah, the cloud nature of Bambu is kind of something looming over the community's head. They have RFID readers in the filament holder. The software's not open source. They already had an incident where jobs sent to the printer got held for several hours (so the printer turned on when they cleared the queue, which might have been unexpected).

It just doesn't seem worth the lock-in risk to me. I will continue to buy printers from Prusa, even though they have zero interest in managing the supply chain. (Still have to import them from Europe, even though they bought a US-based retailer? Weird stuff. But I like them so I will give them a large benefit of the doubt.)

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#67

Post by serf »

nice hardware, crap controller and cloud tether.

it'll be a nice machine to buy on the aftermarket and put a real controller into in a few months/years, much like the rest of BambuLab's offerings.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#68

Post by jrockway »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #44
foxylad wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 3d printing journey seems to have ended with a Prusa Mini. Really solid and well engineered device, and it's delightful that Prusa acknowledge the open-source hardware and software they depended on to build their company. BambooLab... well it is a nice machine, and they have definitely advanced the the field with input shaping. But this machine is pretty much a Prusa Mini with linear rails, and I'd bet there is op…

Bambuu forks Prusa Slicer but appears to do the bare minimum to not get called out.

Prusa Slicer was forked from Slic3r. That's kind of the point of free software; fork it, change the colors, stick your name on it. (Prusa has done a lot more than that, of course.)

Frankly, the less software that hardware companies write, the better. They already have their hands full with the firmware and probably don't need to be setting up CI infrastructure for Linux/Mac/Windows and all that stuff.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#69

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

alsodumb wrote: post #50
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the value that Bambuu brings that’s the problem. We bitch and moan about repairability, owning the device etc. But here we have a piece of hardware that was essentially open source where you owned the hardware and could repair it easily, and turns out, no one ever really gave a shit. Not really. You never wanted that. You wanted the Chinese clone that took the ideas, lowered the price and added cloud shit. I…

'You wanted the Chinese clone that took the ideas, lowered the price and added cloud shit' - two things: 1. Bambu has a lot of innovative hardware pieces that aren't in say Prusa - I wouldn't call it Chinese clone that took the ideas. Bambu is not one of those Prusa clones, let's get that straight. 2. Yup, I appreciate lower price and features that make it easy to use. Yup I appreciate minimal setup time and faster/c…

What can’t be found in an open source project? AI first layer inspection and lidar?

I’m not an enthusiast either, I wanted to produce my own CAD designs. And I understand not wanting to tinker with the printer. I also don’t care about that shit. But I also appreciated that I could just order parts from where ever or even print my own upgrades. I also agree that any decent printer before the Bambuu was expensive. Bambuu really punches above it’s price point.

But a lot of a printer isn’t something complicated and super fiddly that can’t be user repaired. And this style of printer started off as an open source project with maximum right to repair. But at this point, I’m convinced, that if an open source printer with absolute feature parity was released, it would fail. They would never compete on price. Ownership of your device never mattered.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#70

Post by javawizard »

antirez wrote: post #46

This looks much better than it actually is for a couple of reasons: - Multicolor is not something you actually use often and is horribly slow. Slow like in a 2 hours print becomes 12 hours print if it's colored. And it wastes a lot of plastic (and doing so does a lot of noise, too). - The printer can't print things like ASA. Limited to PLA/PETG/TPU. - While the design of the hotend and swappable nozzle looks nice at…

> Multicolor is not something you actually use often and is horribly slow

Let's get the straw man out of the way: "multicolor" is not the only use for printing with multiple filaments.

I own an X1C. I print with breakaway support filament all the time. It's a total game changer. And since only two filament changes are required for each layer that has a support interface, the time it adds to a print is negligible.

There are plenty of uses for multi-filament printing that don't involve changing filaments every single layer of the print.

Post reply on HN