Issues after 2 weeks of use

Bambu Lab X1 Series
8

Ok, first off… You don’t want this printer. You stated that several times so return it.

Most of your problems are self inflicted. If your work is so sensitive, secret, or top-secret, that it cannot be sent to unsecured servers … then no consumer or prosumer connected divice is safe for your line of work. So, you might want to not connect this printer and instead use the SD card.

As to the glue thing… Good for you. Send it back or… I don’t know don’t use the cool plate.

You can turn off most of the features you don’t like.

As for the printing the qrong color issue… Did you move colors in the AMS?

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9

If… If… They are either

A. A public sector employee their shop has a budget and if… If… It’s secured in anyway, then this printer is not viable for their shop and they knew this before purchase. It would never be approved unless the approving person was not aware of the features on this printer… Or these features didn’t get disclosed.

B. More than likely a contractor. If they cannot follow regulations with secured info and are prototyping parts for the public sector in a secured way, they are jeopardizing their clearance and projects by using this printer. There are more appropriate options for this level of work that cost maybe a little bit more. Again, if this is such a security risk with classified projects, they bought the wrong printer.

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10

Oh yeah I whole heartedly agree and don’t think this is a viable alternative to a proper code of conduct, it’s usually written right there in your contract as you state.

Though I am sure people will still attempt to question their purchase as if the marketing didn’t mention cloud enabled software. That’s the big red flag I guess people are ignoring for some reason?

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11

AMS issue - No, I made no changes at all. I hit the ‘Print again’ and ‘Continue’ button and got a totally different set of colors (both colors switched to a different color), this doesn’t happen if I print off the SD card.

I also just did a reprint of the same job that I queued before using Bambu Studio, and I noticed that by default, it had ignored what I set last time (T1=A1, T2=A2), and picked T1=A4, T2=A3), and had I not noticed that and corrected it, it would have wasted another print.

It isn’t so much that my work is so sensitive, secret or top secret… it has more to do with the laws in China… there are NO copyright laws, NONE. An example of why I have been concerned with China, in particular… I was helping a friend publish a game, and I did the work of finding a company who would do everything, I wanted them to do it all except for printing the rules. I could easily print them here, and add them to the boxes when I was ready to ship (zero inventory system, as you don’t pay tax on inventory unless it is a complete unit, which these would all count as parts as would the stack of rules, so no taxes), so the China company said they would be happy to publish the game for $15/game, which would give us about $10 if we sold it for $25, sounds good, lets get started… Their only condition was that I send them the rules and they also publish the rules. There can ONLY be ONE reason they would need that… they have nothing to steal if I only give them the parts and no explanation of how to use it.

As for your statement that I don’t want this printer… because my issues are self inflicted… I’m not seeing that, the reduced bed size (thanks for a solution for that, for those that gave me one), the sharing all my IP with China, where it can be duplicated with zero possibility of being able to sue over theft… Sure, maybe they won’t do that… Maybe they will, maybe I come up with a cool vase that I (or my artist daughter) spent a lot of hours designing and drawing up in a CAD package, and maybe that is selling for $1,000 to collectors… and now, it is also available at price below my cost to produce it from 50 companies in China… Sure, we can just spend another 200 hours to create another one, and see how long that is good for…

I’ve had a fair amount of experience with IP being stolen, and the damage it does to ones morale, not to mention pocket book.

And why would one even send it off lan?? You are REQUIRED to have the printer on the same lan for some things to work (according to the documentation, although, some things seem to work OK without doing that - such as the video actually worked remotely).

As other people have pointed out, being a software architect (in addition to inventor), I setup my printer on its own WAN, using an isolated ISP from my main company network, for the very reasons that were mentioned by others. Yes, by having such a device on your network, you are trusting that they never get a virus on their servers and upload that to all their printers… it is a bit of a reach, but all you need is a way to remotely connect to the machine and then route packets out to the local network, shouldn’t be that hard - it uses unsecure protocols… (http, not https, FTP, not FTPS… ) It uses secure ones when it goes across the internet, but not locally…

Overall, as I said, I find that this is a FANTASTIC printer, and the additional things that I’ve been able to do with it that I can’t with other printers is amazing, I’ve printed prints that failed on every other printer I’ve used - and some of them I tried for weeks to get a good print from, this one, first print, every print perfect.

12

As a software architect who works with AWS, you (in this case Bambu) can decide exactly how/where the files are setup… just because it is going to a US server does not mean it stays there.

Also, it was awesome when the cloud was down for a few hours, and I had to walk the disk to the other room to print, and couldn’t view the status because it wasn’t able to send it off my network and back to it… Limited good reasons for that, it should be designed to figure out that you are on the same network and work exactly the same way, but use the local lan.

Putting in in LAN mode should disable exactly zero features other than downloading updates, and even then, you should have a mode to say 'Lan mode with remote updates - installed when I say it is OK to do so, or tell it when to schedule it… (like, when this print ends, or at 5 AM, or something)

Most of our data for AWS is in fact in the South Central US, but that is by our choice.

I also don’t know why they would want the huge cost of streaming all the videos through their servers, AWS charges per kb of data sent in and out of their networks… I have the camera feed up 24/7 on my main work computer so I can just look at it… I’ve been using this printer nearly 24/7 since I got it…

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Yes, I could sneaker net the file back and forth, and I have to for some prints. (ones that I want to be able to print a 2nd copy of using the print again feature and be sure it gives me the right colors), it is about 55’ to the printer and that back, so about 110’ to make the trip… I have to run the file over there, but I can’t swap out the SD card if it is printing (which is 90% of the time). So, I have to wait, and then run to the printer grab the card, (swap the bed so it is ready for another print), go back to my desk, remember what I wanted to print, export it to the card, and eject it, (instead of hitting one button), and run it back to the printer - put it in using the side of the USB device to push it in as my fingernails are not long enough to either eject it or insert it, this causes wear on the printer, and I know the SD card slots have a limited life space, what happens when that is done? (Yes, I’ve had one wear out on a printer before), I ended up getting an extension cable that fixed it for one printer - it plugged in to the SD card slot and hung out in the air - but for the Bambu, that would need to be mounted somewhere or the door would be hitting it every time I opened it.

As for the LAN mode, I’ve not yet tried that as according to what I read from Bambu, that disables being able to use the App in the phone, or the Studio - although, if that is true, then it doesn’t make sense to call it ‘LAN’ mode, it should be called ‘Network Disabled’ mode - which is actually how I used it for the first 5 days before putting it on its own network / ISP in semi-isolation.

From what I’ve later read, I think the lan mode might sort of work, but I think it will still kill the camera feature that I use all the time - it is how I know the job is about done, or is done, or has had a problem.

14

They should have decoupled the camera streaming from their service and allowed users to opt out of that part of the data collection. Creating a live service and an entire hardware array sounds very ambitious as it is, adding in more network costs just doesn’t sound worth the data price at this point in time. They get plenty of metrics from everything else thusfar.

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15

Actually, just because you are using AWS does not mean you know where your files are going.

  1. AWS has many regions and the customer (BBL) can choose which region is used for data.
  2. Often when someone is concerned about their data going to China, they really are not talking about where it is stored, but rather who has access to it. I suspect that the BBL employees can access data stored on their cloud servers.
16

There is a long post and poll about LAN only mode. It has been pointed out that in addition to LAN only mode, when not set to LAN only the software should be smart enough to recognize that it is on the same LAN and use direct transfer for status, commands, and camera feed.

@traderhut

In one of my first conversations about connectivity problems with a Bambu Lab employee, I complained that Bambu Studio did not stay connected to the printer and had to reconnect at the start of each print, and did so even if I was connected on the device tab. I was very annoyed with this because the sync printer status in the print dialog always timed out and then I had to refresh and wait. I was even using LAN only mode.

The response was, we do not maintain connections because that costs more for the cloud service.

As for the camera feed, I believe that it does go to the cloud when not in lan only mode. That is why the camera for the X1 does not work in LAN mode.

In order to allow remote access to the camera feed from Handy on a device not on the local network, they must be storing the actual video file in the cloud and then appending to it. The device just keeps downloading the tail of the file. I suspect this is why Handy does not work in LAN only mode.

The entire system was originally designed as a cloud only system. They had to start adding LAN support because people like me would not buy a cloud solution.

In my opinion the system should always use the LAN for communications if possible. If the user wants the print file stored in the cloud it should be an option on the print dialog. Lan ONLY mode should never try to access the cloud. Current the printer supports that, but Bambu Studio does not.

Please add your thoughts to the poll so we can get BBL to improve things for us.

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17

You have my vote, thanks for doing the legwork! Very thorough!

18

I would add one more thing that I found as a feature that seems obvious to implement:

  1. Tell me what your humidity sensor actually is returning as the humidity. I’d like to know if it is 10% or 20%, you might consider both of them 'OK", but I’d like to know it might be time to start thinking about updating the drying agent (I also use a molecular sieve inside of the spools (using the printed holders for that).
  2. There is a printable update for the AMS to allow it to handle smaller spools, that sounds like a simple design change to the plastic you are using. I got some 200g spools and was less than impressed that I couldn’t use them. I ended up printing a spool holder that was the size of a normal 1kg spool holder (with a space to hold a drying agent inside - the remake for it is published on thingaverse), and had to print that so I could use the smaller spools. It worked, but kind of sucks if someone has already provided you a solution and you just haven’t applied it yet. (To be fair, you would have to change your injection molded mold for that part, and that isn’t cheap, so I get that…)
  3. You say in one of the configuration screens something about should you track the amount left on each spool - and I do track that, but where can I see that? I don’t see it anywhere.
  4. The purge volumes seem high for the most part, I’ve lowered most of them to the 103 or 107 level and only had an issue switching from purple to white, and I raised that to around 150 and it seems like it was fine.
  5. the print tower seemed to come on by default, it doesn’t make any sense for this printer to use a print tower - you purge to an external waste bin, so why would you ever make a tower?
  6. I can’t seem to change where to put the tower, but the obvious location is on top of the calibration space, using up space on the far side doesn’t make sense. I used to use towers all the time on my 3 color single head printers, and I was able to move them to another location in the slicer (don’t recall which one I was using, I’ve moved multi color to the E3D printer, or now this one with the AMS)
  7. Would be nice if the lamp could be brighter once you are done with the LiDAR which you say it interferes with, yeah, that is a no-brainer… you want a nice bright image of your print, both for the time lapse as well as remove viewing.
  8. The calibration once seems to only be an option if you get a 3rd party version of the slicer, clearly, that needs to be a checkbox on a print, where it saves it by default.
  9. if you last printed in spool 1, and you haven’t printed anything else since… On your next print it seems you should be OK to have not unloaded the filament from that head, because maybe, you are printing with the same color the next time, and perhaps, you might not want to have it purge 150mm of your filament out the waste bin to ‘clear out’ the color that was there… This would save time not having to unload the color and reload the color after each print if you were doing a lot of the same color. (I understand why you would unload it, makes it easy to push a button and pull out the filament instead of having to do a ‘unload’ of it, and avoids someone yanking hard on it and wrecking the printer… so maybe this isn’t that big of an issue… just tosses money away and is bad for the environment and such…

I’d also love to be able select what color prints first… there are times that is important… if I have a 2 color print, but both of those colors are on the 1st layer say, A and B, and the rest of the print is all B for example. One way to print that is to load B and print, then purge to A, print A, and purge to B and print all the rest of the layers. a 2nd way is to print A, switch to B and print the whole rest of the print. Also, I might care about which color I calibrate with as well…

A few suggestions… Again, love this printer and it has been running non stop since I got it!

19

I found that when I print with silk and matte and both are on the first layer… That I prefer flow calibration be done on the silk filament. Changing the models filament usually works. Just make sure you change the filament before painting.

Sometimes I’ll make the 1st layer all one filament type or color. 99% of the time the first layer isn’t seen.

20

In my case, the bottom is the top of the print, this is something that works fantastic on this print, especially if you use a 3rd party print bed with an amazing texture… You get that texture as well as multiple colors smoothed together and it comes out fantastic (for coins for example), but there are a lot of other things this works for… But yes, until I started doing this, my bottom layer was often not seen…

21

I’m sure China wants ur 10 yo daughters art. :joy::rofl::joy::rofl:

23

If its worth ripping off and selling on Scamazon. It’ll happen

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24

You can use MQTT to get humidity percentage.

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25

Well, she is attending college with a focus on graphic art/design… I’m hoping that someone does :slight_smile: What I’ve seen has been fantastic, and she has sold some of her work…

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26

Thank you, I’ll look into it…

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Julie
Would you please give a sample of G-code that can be removed for those of us that are not expert in G-code. TYIA

28

I will post it as soon as I can.