The quick swap nozzle is a major feature of the A1 mini to me. I’m happy to see a really good implementation for this, better than the revo I also use because the filament cutter means you don’t have to wait for the hotend to do heatup/cooldown/heatup cycle to remove/reload the filament.
Now I wonder if we can go even further with the A1 mini: does it support hot-swapping the nozzle ? I.e. not having to turn off the power to change it. Can someone from bambu lab answer this? It requires the hardware and maybe the firmware to be designed for this.
If this is possible I would be interested in developing the slicer software to add a “change nozzle at height” feature similar to the “change color at height”, that would retract the filament, wait for the head to complete cooldown, move the head to some convenient place and wait for user input. After the nozzle has been changed, home the head, load the filament and resume printing with the new diameter selected from the slicer.
I have several use cases for this feature as I frequently print texts or logos on top of objects, sometimes big enough objects. In order to get the fine details printed nicely I use the 0.2mm nozzle and the print takes very long as a consequence. I would love to be able to print with 0.6mm or 0.4mm to save big time then swap to 0.2mm only to get the fine details so I don’t have to compromise on quality.
I doubt Bambu will encourage users to swap the nozzle when it’s hot or mid print. Safety wise it’s just a terrible idea. I’m sure there would be a work around but you probably would have to also splice gcode files as the slicer currently won’t let you change nozzles mid print.
For a BL official answer, it is better to use TT communication; a non-official answer, as others said, is no.
But it is already possible. Just use both @JonRaymond and @zviratko answers, i.e. custom g-code for print with different nozzles and power off the printer, replace nozzle and restart with auto recovery.
You want to develop the slicer function? or requesting?
Actually it’s safer to change the nozzle while the machine is on and telling you to do so, because the temperature is measured and you can ensure it’s not hot. Powering off can even cause the hotend to heat up or clog if the fan turns off while the heatsink it’s still hot if you don’t wait enough.
And yes I can develop the code for the slicer myself (I could do the firmware as well if needed but unfortunately it’s closed source). I’m aware that it’s a niche use case and there are horribly inconvenient workarounds, so I’m posting here to try to get an answer regarding the hot swap capability and to see if there are other people interested into such a feature.
Maybe in the A1. I am thinking about the X1C, and whilst it is easily doable, I wouldn’t advise anyone on that… Of course, things may be different if the machine entails an official protocol…
You are correct. But that’s why it requires the custom g-code to ensure it pauses, removes filament, cool-down, etc…
As you are comfortable coding, try the Bambu Studio GitHub webpage. You will see that the community is quite active and focused on the software. For contributing, you may get even better changes in the Orca Slicer GitHub page.
For the firmware, you can apply for feature requests in the forum.