Filament change (colour) without AMS

Bambu Lab Software
21

Thanks to everyone’s advice. I have a P1S. I was building a control board for my Banshee Project and wanted raised letters above the buttons. I followed the idea that you can select a spot in the slicer where you insert a pause. (right side of slicer window). It even showed me the estimated time in the print where I would switch to the Letters. Once there it paused. I was able to unload the black filament and then load silver. Worked great. No need to retract and extrude. This is July 2, 2024 so maybe this was all fixed in an update.

22

Does anyone know of a way that full-color changes can be done without AMS? not just changing it by layer but mid-layer like with AMS? I thought that changing the Filament Change Gcode to just a pause Gcode (M400 U1) then when it was ready to color change it would just pause. I could unload and reload the filament, but when I tried this it printed out the purge line then instead of printing the model it went over to the poop chute and started to give me errors. it told me that it could not detect the AMS. Has anyone figured this out or tried this?

23

Welcome to the forum.

Nope, that’s the point of the AMS. It doesn’t make sense to try to figure out a manual way and to baby sit a print when you can plug in a AMS that takes care of it.

24

Yes, I know that’s the point of the AMS, but for those who don’t have an AMS and don’t want to spend $300 on one it would be helpful. I’m obviously not going to be sitting in front of my printer printing a giant multi color model for hours, but if I want to add a logo or image to the bottom of one of my prints, 10 minutes of manually swapping colors 2 or 3 times doesn’t bother me as that is what I did on my ender 3, so when I upgraded to a bambu I was disappointed that it could not do this.

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25

Buy an AMS, you’ll thank me later. Once you have an AMS you will wonder why you didn’t get one sooner.

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26

What steps were required to make color changes mid-layer on the Ender?

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27

The problem here is what about if I wanted to switch to a filament that isn’t AMS supported? Like going to TPU from PLA?

Bambu needs to just support the change option provided in the slicer to not be AMS limited.

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28

Good news to anyone reading this older thread…

Filament “Unload” and “Load” for a color or material change is now supported in the Handy app when a pause has been programmed in a print layer in Bambu Studio slicer. I just tested it on a simple test cube print using the Handy iOS app and it worked perfectly, but with a small annoyance. While the print was paused and I was going through the unload and load steps (hotend heating up, pulling out the filament, etc.), a reminder to resume the print job kept popping up in the Handy app screen obscuring the instructions I needed to see. Thankfully here’s an “x” right underneath the popup to delete it. It came back several times.

29

So, it’s year 2025, with BS 20.0.1.50 and we still don’t have this feature…I guess dev’s are too busy adding features nobody ever asked for (I’m still sour about their last firmware update removing support for 3rd party slicers)

The current work around is:

  1. edit filament profile:
    image

  2. in the filament edit window go to Advanced tab and add into Filament end G-code field the following:

    ; filament end gcode

    {if layer_num < total_layer_count - 1} ; don’t pause on last layer
    M400 U1         ; pause
    {endif}
    image
    image736×593 19 KB



  3. Save it as a new profile (recommended)

  4. Repeat 1-4 for each filament that will be used during print

  5. Slice and print as usual

During the print it will pause when need filament change:

  1. press Close button on printer’s screen
  2. go to filaments section and hit Unload button
  3. pull out filament
  4. press Load button
  5. push in new filament (make sure it’s grabbed)
  6. press Done button (you don’t have to wait for it to finish the load process)
  7. press Resume button (if popup is not shown, resume from home screen)

This seems to work well, even prime tower works.

P.S.
originally with simple M400 U1 gcode line it would also pause at the end of last layer, which I found annoying, so I’ve added {if} … {endif} lines that would skip pause on last layer. If your print has color change on last layer, then you’ll need remove these lines.