Is LiDAR a gimmick?

Bambu Lab X1 Series
21

I am pretty sure the lidar DOES something.

I print my own dual color filament (with Prusa and today on the X1c). Because i cannot print a perfectly round filament it is flatten on the bottom. Printing with it on the Prusa this means i have to up the flow rate by approx 10%.
Today i used this filament on the X1c and started the print with the ‘normal’ settings, that is, with bed levelling and flow calibration on. I printed a calibration cube (30×30×30mm) in vase mode that i use to measure the wall thickness.
When the print was ready and i measured the wall thickness it was 0.442 on average, where it should be 0.45. That’s only off by 2%, not the 10% i would have measured when printing on the Prusa or when the X1c wasn’t compensating the flow.

My conclusion is that the X1c does calibrate the flow at the start of the print with help of the Lidar.

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22

Bambu have confirmed that the LiDAR calibration does not calibrate flow rate, rather only the Pressure Advance/Linear Advance values at this time.

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23

Well then i cannot explain why the X1c prints with almost perfect flow for every filament and filament type i throw at it. On my Prusa mk3s+ i have to finetune almost every filament to get a perfect 0.45mm single wall.
Certainly Pressure Advance/Linear Advance calibration hasn’t anything to do with it, or does it?

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24

That is the thing. Prusa and Prusa staff are arrogant as AF 100% of the time. Everything they make is the best. And it shows. I have seen the prusa XL in person a month ago(technically have a day one pre-order on it) and it was kinda underwhelming. it was printing pretty slow(much faster than a MK3S tho). print quality was great but nothing GROUND breaking. still needs a purge tower for multi tool heads. it was cool to see it work. thought the draft shield was gonna be mechanized but it was just manual lifting with magnets. The prusa XL is so overengineered with fifty billion sensors in just a hotend. the multi tile heated bed is cool but man don’t know if I care about controlling multiple tiles just to save some power. the organic support it was using on a iron man mask was cool though. curious to see how it works when it gets released on prusa slicer.

But in general I have seen prusa employees and especially the fanbase go “yeah but the prusa MK3S has the ~prusa support~ even if the MK3s is slower” and ■■■■ like “yeah but prusa is more reliable”. My own experiences speak against that lmao.

It’s ridiculous how fanatic that brand is in general.

Also noticed that out of nowhere the whole GPL and drama on the X1C/P1P and ankermake started and the big typical prusa supporting folks causing a whole riot and ofcourse josef prusa joining in and I thought to myself “ah the XL is going to release soon” and lo and behold the XL got it’s january release date like a week or two later. Just like I thought. The slandering and nitpicking about competitors is in full force since the XL is releasing :man_shrugging: I got the MK3S as my first printer years ago and that printer alone has turned me off prusa as a brand. Probably will cancel my XL order because god damn 2000 euro for a single toolhead printer makes NO MORE SENSE now. maybe back when I pre-ordered it almost two years ago but with the rise of voron kits and bambu and anker. the P1P makes buying a MK3S irrelevant (hell most I3 style printers these days are as good or better than the MK3S). The X1C bundle gives us 4 color while a 5 toolhead XL is 3700 euro. Other than build size the X1C stomps the XL value wise. plus eh the XL will have alot of issues at launch. the MK3 had issues. the mini had issues. The only prusa product that didn’t have at launch issues was the SL1 and that design wasn’t even made by them since they bought a company that had a finished product.

I hope that bambu goes balls to the wall and releases a XL1C with I don’t know 300 cubed or 350 cubed for 2000-2300. The chance of prusa having a X1C at their office is very very likely considering how big of a competitor the brand is to them.

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25

@That_one_Belgian, i don’t understand what this has anything to do with the Lidar function on the X1c?

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26

I think @That_one_Belgian is referring to @MotherOfInvention comment about the filament flow.
And I have to strongly agree.

Working with the X1C for about 10 days, it‘s pretty remarkable how well my prints have finished.

I had so many issues on my old i3 clone and had to constantly change temperature for every other filament.

My Bambu Lab printer simply does not care. Standard 220 degrees celsius and done.
And I personally, think the lidar is working just fine. Looking at all the different lines at preparation I can always see improvements until the print finally starts.
Never had a bad print.

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27

No, i don’t think so. It’s more of a rant on Prusa than it is about filament flow…

Anyway, @mowcius explained it pretty much: actual flow calibration is not yet available for the X1 as BL mentioned. Still my X1c prints with pretty good flow without any (manual) calibration from my side. And this printer sure is a step up from my other i3-styled printers, i have to agree on that.

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28

Well, in my understanding, Pressure Advance/Linear Advance it is what their patent are claimed for:

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Lidar is a gimmiock? i think not but no matter what i think, no matter if lidar is a joke. i can throw any filament into the printer and it comes out with an almost perfect result. I don’t care how he does it either. with or without lidar. almost every filament can be printed almost perfectly. with my other printers i always had to try to find a new setting for the different brands.

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30

I have an X1C, so my attitude is like micla34’s, but the buyers who have to worry about this question are the ones considering the P1P instead, since, IIRC, LIDAR is NOT available on the P1P. If the LIDAR is (or becomes) a big differentiator, then those buyers may have a lot of future remorse because of no upgrade path. Cognitive dissonance–no getting around it. On the other hand, maybe the reason it was dropped from the P1P–and with no upgrade path to it–is because it turned out to make not much difference?

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31

Correct, but that doesn’t fundamentally stop them using it for absolute flow calibration (which to most people is what it sounds like it does). I’d also be very surprised if there isn’t prior art for such a calibration method so they wouldn’t have a patent on that.

Fundamentally I stand by saying that no, it’s not a gimmick as it does do what it sets out to do, and not terribly either, however it also makes such a small difference compared to just setting the PA to 0.02 manually (for all filaments) that it’s not a part of the X1 series I’d be telling people is worth it over the P1P. Chamber, hardened nozzle, and more powerful controller yes, Micro LiDAR no.

I think so many people are just used to rubbish printers that there’s a lot of the print quality being incorrectly attributed to the auto-PA-cal as that’s one of the things which is the most obviously different to other machines.

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32

Did some one allready tried to remove the LiDAR and use the P1P StartCode? :smiley:

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33

I have a X1C for about 2 weeks and have been using only PLA. It works great!

So, i tried PETG for the first time yesterday and the test strip printed and was scanned by the Lidar… Half the extrusion was missing on the plate and no message came up on the display. The printer continued to print and the quality was ok (not great but ok).

So what did the lidar do? What did it see? Did it compensate for the poor tracks somehow?

34

What Plate will you use? on the textured Plate, the lidar can not work properly. Bambu is telling that and i believe it because the rough texture of this plate may distort the lidar results. it may work, but it doesn’t must…

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35

Double textured PEI from Bambu the most. It’s just working with lidar, only not scanning first layer.

36

Virtually, it does NOTHING!

I mean, X1C lidar was sold as flow calibration, the problem was that BambuLab is new to 3D Printing and they didn’t know the different between flow and pressure advance.

In practice if it fails, it sets to its fallback that is 0.02

; see if extrude cali success, if not ,use default value
M1002 judge_last_extrude_cali_success
M622 J0
    M400
    M900 K0.02 M{outer_wall_volumetric_speed/(1.75*1.75/4*3.14)*0.02}
M623

More experience users were able to break into its MQTT to find out that the pressure advance aka PA was in fact failing so the lidar was not doing anything.

The very first units would show the error on display, BL decided to release firmware changes to hide the error :upside_down_face:

At this moment, you must manually do PA calibration, flow calibration because these printers are unable to do it on their own.

99.99% chance the PA was set like so M900 K0.02 like I mentioned above. It will print but not with the best setting.
No message was displayed because of the firmware changes they made after the first units started displaying the error.

Anything with “auto” with these printers, does not work properly or doesn’t work at all.

If you wanna make the most of your unit, use SoftFeveer slicer, and explore the calibration menu to properly calibrate your filaments:

  • pressure advance aka PA
  • flow calibration
  • max vol aka how fast the hotend can melt that filament

These tests must be done manually, saved per filament to have the best quality printer as possible.

37

The sensor does something. It works and it actually allows many filaments just to be used with stock settings and they work fine. It does not mean that it will always find the perfect settings for each filament and model combination, but simply driving your printer it does its job pretty well.

Do you absolutely need it? Clearly a no. You can do everything that it does manually, maybe even better.
Does it work? Most of the time, at least when you use the suggested build plate for using the lidar and not a textured PEI plate.
Is the first layer inspection working. Yes, it works pretty good and did not produce any false positives for now, but saved me a couple of prints that were already not working on first layer.

Is it worth the cost? We do not know actually, as we do not know what the lidar adds as cost to the printer. The P1P strips a lot more then just the lidar, it has a crappy microcontroller, is missing fans and an housing and camera.

If you want to save a buck, get a P1P, if you want the comfort of the X1C, get that. I like my X1C, it prints usually very well. But the P1P uses the same mechanical drive system and should perform very well too, but needs more tweaking. If you love to tweak your printer but a P1P…or better, build a Voron, RatRig or VZBOT. After all, there is no right or wrong answer to such questions.

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38

By the way, the LiDAR does get involved in Z-height adjustment.

I had hastily put on my base plate such that it contacted the side supports when raising the bed. That would normally indicate that the nozzle had touched the plate, but the LiDAR information that came back must have been inconsistent, since it repeated the bed “shake” and tried again.

39

Prove it!

Like I said, advanced users broke into its MQTT output to find the lidar failing.
Does it “work”, whatever that means to you,??? Not really.

PA at 0.02 will in theory sort of work with filament but that is not the point.
When I buy a $2k 3D printer with a feature such the lidar, I expect it to work flawlessly, not pretend it work and remove errors from the display so users cannot see it.

X1C requires no lidar, period, they could have easily removed it and have an ever cheaper printer without fake advertisement.

You are comparing day and night, lidar has nothing to do to with Z-height which is done by the nozzle touching the bed, full stop.

The “shake” means the printer is trying to find the right frequency, when the tolerance is too off let’s say it was expecting 60Hz but got 100Hz back, it tries again or display error message according to its logic.

In my case, it would display laser errors and all, long story short, I had to open it and the bed communication cable socket on the main board. Others users had to replace the whole bed.
Lidar has nothing to do with Z-height.

I had a bunch of tickets until I returned it.

For the matter, the sake aka input shape does not work.
My prints had ringing all over them due to that. You can see it by yourself, check users with non matte filaments. Matte filaments hide the ringing/VFA.
I built a Voron Trident, up to 250mm/s and acceleration up to 12.6k but I don’t need all of that.
I ran input shaper on it, the printer is killing it with free ringing, printing 200mm/s at 5-7k.

My X1C had to be reduces to 170mm/s and 5k accell to reduce ringing, but was still there.

I spent 3 months with endless tests, so much filament wasted, support tickets, you name it.
X1C wasn’t my first printer either which is the case for many noobs.

40

Just ran a test… i attached a bolt to the unit so when the bed was raised it would contact the bolt. Since the printer doesn’t have a way to distinguish between the bolt and the nozzle head, that should be the end of it.

No, it wasn’t. The printer continued to attempt to home the Z axis. My assumption is that the LiDAR was able to confirm that the information from the feedback was incorrect, and to continue trying.

Update: I instead placed the bolt on the print bed so the nozzle would contact it, giving a false sense of where the bed was… and in this case it appeared that the LiDAR did not detect this case, and the false “home” was made. So… this implies the LiDAR is doing nothing, or at least not much.

Update2: The LiDAR definitely does something, though. I have had it detect first layer faults as advertised. No false negatives or positives so far.

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