I have had my X1C for almost a year now. It is my third 3D printer. I started off with a Creality CR-10 when they first came out. I scratch built a V-King. The CR-10 is more upgrades than original now. Both of those can make better prints than the X1C although not as fast or as reliably. I bought the X1C to use as a tool. Shortly after I bought it I got a SuperTac plate when it came out which I found I could not use without disabling the build plate detection feature. This irritated me greatly because I had to turn off a feature I paid extra for making the tool less valuable. I also bought some interesting filaments, namely the Bambu Wood fill PLA which I could not use because the printer did not understand the RFID tags. Those were not yet supported. I believe I also had trouble with the Bambu metal PLA at that time. No problem though because I was using Orca as my slicer and I was able to build really good profiles for those filaments. Bambu Studio did not have the calibration tools and still does not. Why this is important will become apparent. I lived with this until sometime in January when an update became available which would solve both of my printer issues. I applied the update and Orca stopped working. Go online and read about all the controversy. I wanted to continue to use Orca. Put the printer in Developer mode and LAN mode and I was able to continue to use Orca. One upside of LAN mode is that prints start a lot sooner because my Gcode does not have to go to China and then back to the printer. A couple of months pass and another update. Orca no longer works. Orca can’t connect to the printer and control it although it can still be used to view the camera. Yeah, makes no sense. I turned off LAN mode and went switched to Bambu Studio. I have lived with this for a couple of months but I bought some engineering materials that have no generic selections that work very well. The automatic flow dynamics calibration don’t give good results. I can’t run the Orca tests. I can generate Gcode in Orca and write that to an SD card but the printer insists on running the lidar flow calibration when you print gcode directly from an SD card. This makes the prints useless for calibration purposes.
Bambu has done some good things. They made a series of printers that are pretty good. The real thing they did was make a good out of the box experience for most people. And this does not depend on being closed source.
A few years ago I retired from an independent telephone company where what I mostly worked on was the internet. I worked with the networks and backbones and security for such. I can tell you that as an end user with a 3D printer in my home there was no security issue. A foreign entity can not talk to my devices unless I deliberately allow it. This is true of anyone who has a NAT device as a firewall and this is an almost universal arrangement. The security update was not for the customers benefit. The addition of a 3D printer to my home is no worse than that of adding a smart TV. If there was a security concern it was probably on the Bambu server side. Bambu has broken my tool. Can I roll back to a previous update where Orca worked? Maybe. But I don’t want to because to do so prevents the addition of new stuff from working. It breaks the tool. Orca is a better slicer than Bambu Studio even though it is based on Bambu Studio and Prusa Slicer. Bambu Studio is based on Prusa Slicer. Prusa slicer was based on Slic3r. Before Orca I used Slic3r, Cura, and the Ideamaker slicers. Ideamaker was my favorite.
My X1C has VFA’s in the X axis only. Because it is a core XY the VFA’s only completely go away when you print a wall purely in the Y axis. The spacing is 2mm the same as the belt tooth spacing. I have read thousands of posts on this topic and no clear answer. I don’t have an H2D but I have seen prints with the same issues. The P1 series printers also have this.
I am not a mechanical engineer. I took some mechanical engineering courses in College almost 50 years ago. I have looked at the kinematics in the X1C, I even bought a spare X gantry so I could see and measure it better. The belt pathing is wrong in both X and P series printers. Probably also in the H2D. It looks like they started out using toothed idlers for the lower left and upper right idler pulleys but switched to smooth to save a few cents per machine. I understand why they did this but they needed to redesign the endcaps and move the idler pulleys to account for the height of the teeth. The lower belt is progressively wrong the closer you get to the left side and the upper belt is wrong when you get to the right side. The Y axis in not excluded from this pathing issue. The lower belt is most wrong when at the front and the upper belt is most wrong when at the rear. This is due to the belt not being parallel with the direction of motion. The closer the gantry gets to the ends the more out of alignment the belt becomes and the gantry moves farther than it should. This is a subtle effect and it would be most noticeable if you were to draw a triangle from front left to rear right. Instead of a straight line you will get a slight S curve in the hypotenuse of the triangle. The belt tension will also change when you get near the sides and most at the left front and right rear corners.
The second issue with replacing toothed idlers with smooth ones is that the belt teeth are squished. I only have a little over 600 hours on my X1C but The teeth on the lower left side are polished as are the upper right side where the teeth roll over the pulley. I don’t know how this will affect the longevity of the belt but it will probably lessen the life somewhat.
I suspect that with the small diameter of these pulleys there is also some belt bounce when a belt tooth contacts the surface of the smooth pulley. And this could be part of the source of the VFA’s.
I do not like the use of springs to tension the belts. But they do eliminate the need for some one or thing to calibrate the belt tension when the belts are installed. Springs will add a resonance component to the motion system.
I also have also had an issue with nozzle strikes. I have bent two nozzles in my 600+ hours. I don’t even know when they happened. The printer makes lots of moves it does not have to make when starting a print.
I installed the Bambu approved BIQU Panda Revo nozzle adaptor. Revo has 0.15, 0.25, 0.8, 1.0, 1.2, and 1.4 mm nozzles in addition to the 0.4 and 0.6 that are normally supported. I wanted the really small nozzles. The detail with the 0.15 is amazing. But you have to lie to the printer about what is installed. And this makes it less tool like because you have to do an override in the slicer to get it to print.
My recommendations have directly sold at least 10 Bambu machines. And indirectly many more. I can no longer recommend these printers especially now that there appear to be good alternatives for less money that do not have the software issues. I have apologized to those people who bought Bambu printers because of my recommendation.
What could Bambu do to make me like them again?
Bambu should drop Bambu Studio and embrace Orca. Keep in mind that they did not invent Bambu Studio, it started life as Prusa Slicer. Drop the security lie reasoning behind the Orca lockout. Make a functional LAN mode the default. Uploading the gcode to China and then sending it back to the printer is to put it simply, stupid. If you have to keep Bambu Studio then provide the necessary tools to calibrate third party filaments properly.
So what am I going to do? I modeled an endcap so I could replace the smooth idler with a toothed one. There is no good way to replace the idlers if they go bad so this was the only reasonable way. My model is not finished and may never be. And that is because this would not fix my software issues and might have no effect on the VFA’s. I have also considered replacing the electronics in my X1C with something that can use Trinamic drivers and run Klipper. Again, this does not fix all the issues and doesn’t give me a tool that just works. The problem is getting Klipper to talk to the proprietary hardware, namely to the AMS, Lidar and the bed leveling sensors. I also want a tool changer. I am tired of all the wasted plastic from filament changes. I will most likely sell my X1C when there is a Voron or Ratrig kit available that uses the BondTech INDX tool changer.
I don’t want to punish Bambu, I just think they are going down the wrong path. Bambu does not own the market like DJI does with drones. The rest of the 3D printing industry has caught up and even surpassed them in a kinder and more friendly way.
If your Bambu printer does everything you want I am happy for you. Best wishes everyone!
Doug Ingraham
Rapid City, SD
