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Bambu Lab A1 Mini

bambulab.com

81–90 of 149 posts

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#81

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 pr…

RFID reader is not a thing when you don't use AMS (for multi color printing). RFID is used to identify the filament, otherwise you just have to set it manually on what did you load to which holder.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#82
post #65
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes, they do seem to improve LAN support in subsequent updates, see[0] for example 1.7.0 release notes where they added camera stream to LAN Only mode as well

[0] https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/releases/tag/v01.07....

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#83

C'mon everyone, we can do better. As someone who owns an X1C, it's abundantly clear that many of the comments are armchair quarterbacking from folks who don't own a Bambu and have never tried one. Cheap Chinese clone? That's like calling SpaceX a cheap knockoff of Orbital ATK. Camera can only stream to Bambu's servers? Factually incorrect, you can stream locally via RTSP. I come here for insightful debate about a com…

It looks like the RTSP stream is X1C exclusive, and not available on the P1 series. Not sure about the A1 as that's new

https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/1536

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#84
Just remember if a device that is intended to operate stand-alone/offline requires you to make an account or connect it to the internet to active it. It isn't yours and will stop working one day.

DJI and Insta360 for example require you to connect their cameras to the internet in order to "activate" them. What do you think will happen when those servers get turned off.

Same goes for 3d printer and regular printers. I wouldn't put it past HP to add a feature that would prevent you from printing if the printer hasn't been able to call home for the last x days.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#85
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.

They've been called out for removing credits from merged code by the main developer of OrcaSlicer: https://twitter.com/fever_soft/status/1678262984999837701 . Technically not against licenses, but still.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#86
I've been tracking the Bambu printers ever since the crowdfunding days, and the overall feature set is impressive. Like I wrote the other day* Prusa is in trouble here. As much as I appreciate them (being in the EU myself and owning an old Prusa clone), they are not competitive feature-wise (although the XL mostly holds its own against the X1 series as a workhorse printer if you buy it with multiple toolheads).

The A1 Mini is a better deal than the Prusa Mini if you need to print with support materials (never mind color, that's just a gimmick) or if you want to make sure it will keep going as spools run out, although mechanically the AMS lite looks rather fragile and takes up a _lot_ of space.

In a year's time smaller manufacturers like Kingroon are quite likely to be able to copy a lot of the quality of life improvements (and I would love to see some of those noise reduction features and improved auto-tuning come to Klipper, which I'm running on both my printers).

Until then, though, Bambu is ahead--although I have a feeling my next printer will be a Voron because I really like the idea of not relying on a manufacturer for maintenance (but that's just me).

* https://taoofmac.com/space/links/2023/09/20/2233

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#87
post #60
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.

multi-color is lots of fun! https://github.com/cjdaly/FishCoin

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are letting your past experience color your objective opinions here. As someone who refused to even want to get into 3D printing.... last month in preparation for DEFCON, I was forced into entering this world in order to make a special project for the con. Knowing absolutely nothing, I first picked the Sovol SV06 because is was a strong recommendation from Reddit for the price I was willing to pay.....turns out i…

Could you elaborate on the SV06's shortcomings? I bought one after selling my Ender 3 (the shittiest machine ever made) and it has everything you want from a home 3D printer. Auto-calibration, no manual bed leveling, an excellent extruder, powder-coated PEI sheet (can print PETG straight on the bed without damaging it) and it's really sturdy. Oh, and it works out of the box (after some quick assembly). It's basically…

I’m currently researching what printer to buy and I was put off by the fact that the SV06 doesn’t have filament runout detection, so I’m personally considering the Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro instead which seems to have the features I would like in the same price range.

Re: Bambu Lab A1 Mini

#90
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…

> The printer can't print things like ASA. Limited to PLA/PETG/TPU.

Why would it not print ASA? In my experience (I mostly print ASA, with PLA almost always used for prototyping), printing ASA is about as easy as PLA. 10-30 degrees hotter, less fan and possibly slightly slower speeds but otherwise just fine.

This printer seems to be rated to 300℃ which should give you a margin of over 60+℃ for ASA.

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