so, I bought a textured pei build plate in anticipation of the new carbon I was waiting for… turns out that it is “not advised for lidar”. Didn’t know it when I bought it. Bambulabs just tells me that its compatible with the P1s And X1. But what is the point of having LiDar if you can’t use it?
I hate the stick on PLA cold sheets they sent with the X1. Actually, the accessories package with the P1S was better than the X1 Carbon.
Wondering what build plates you all like the best. I personally hate using glue.
The textured PEI plate is incompatible because of the texture (doh! )
Because of the way LIDAR works it can’t (yet) distinguish between the texture and the filament line. So automatic flowrate and pressure advance calibration will not work with that plate (it might on an aftermarket plate with a finer texture though).
I personally like to calibrate my filaments myself though so I rarely use the LIDAR. However, I do admit I never tried first layer inspection on the textured plate. Maybe worth a try because it should work differently.
I personally am agnostic about plates. I choose them depending on my requirements concerning material, surface finish and so on. I never use glue other than using the cool plate for some reason (which I seldom do).
Bambu recommends filament calibration and Lidar bed-levelling on the smooth plates and then disabling auto-calibration and Lidar bed-levelling on the print with the textured plate. That should retain the correct values for the textured plate.
I have yet to try it though as the smooth plates were, to date, good enough for my purposes.
First layer inspection works on a textured plate, I think because it uses the conventional camera, not LIDAR.
Calibration does not work on a textured plate because the LIDAR is checking for consistent width and height of the printed lines and a textured surface is necessarily uneven.
X1 firmware 1.06 improved support for the textured pei plate.
Improved dynamic flow calibration on a PEI plate and reduced the print area usage as much as possible
Our team has worked on perfecting the dynamic flow calibration and first layer inspection methods to include support for the Textured PEI Plates. In the past, calibrating your printer’s flow rate could provide bad calibration numbers. In this version, the results should be similar to printing on a smooth surface like the Cool Plate or Engineering Plate.
Please note that there’s still a chance for the calibration not to work as expected. If you notice the print quality is not within expectations, we recommend calibrating on the smooth sheet.
My workflow whenever I get a new brand/type of filament is to run the automatic pressure advance and flow rate calibrations on the Cool Plate or the Engineering Plate.
After calibration, I use the textured PEI plate for most production printing.
The only other time I use the Cool Plate is when I have a large PLA model that will benefit from the lower chamber temps of running the bed at 35°C instead of 55-60°C.
Works fine. Didnt work before the update that @dana.nelson posted. Make sure to keep the lidar clean. Especially if you print asa. The cool plate is ■■■■. I peeled mine off and now use the plate as a double sided engineering plate for my p1p. Even the calibration page has a textured pei option now. And when you choose it in the slicer, it makes the correct corrections to the results.
)