There are times when being creative is a good thing. That is how new ideas improve the world.
However, if something works well, then don’t change it. If you can, copy good ideas.
The filament load process on BambuLab printers is ridiculous. I have a Prusa so I know how easy it can be. Please, please just copy the way Prusa does load and unload.
Poor choices
manual temperature setting to load filament. This makes no sense. Loading filament does not require an exact temperature. Just allow selection of filament type (PLA, PETG, ABS, etc.)
manual extruding is the wrong way to load filament. It is a useful feature to have. There are times when one might really want to feed manually. However, not when loading filament. Again, auto load just extrudes for a bit and checks with user that color is correct.
I have problems every time I change filament. I stand there pushing the filament into the tube and pushing extrude down arrow. When I don’t hear the extruder cycle and after several tries nothing happens I get frustrated. Then I push and hold the down arrow for extrude. Finally filament starts coming out and I let go. Then it just extrudes forever until I give up and turn off the machine. There are multiple cases when the printer gets into some state where it won’t respond to any attempts with the controls to make it just stop what it is doing.
I love the print speed and quality, but the user interface really is a big disappointment.
Guess I must be creative because all I do is stick the filament into the tube as far as it will go, hit the extruder down button twice and let the printer do the rest when it starts the print.
It would be more tedious manually changing filament in the middle of a print, but, so far I have never needed to do that.
How hard can it be to load the filament?
Push the filament all the way to the extruder and press the down button exactly 1 time while pushing the filament a little into the PTFE.
Then you will find that you can’t pull the filament back and it has been grabbed by the extruder.
No temperature, no frustration, no witchcraft.
No more difficult than the unload button.
If you can’t do it, I’m out of words …
Press “unload” pull old out slide new in and hold with mild pressure then ONE extrude feed command. DONE
The printer then purges the length of the extruder to nozzle distance on start of every print to ensure the filament break is gone every time.
I love hating on missing basic software features but get real here. Two buttons is fine.
The reason it stops responding is the same as every other printer ever made. It executes one command at a time in the order it is given. If you command extrude a zillion times it will do it.
You admit you are doing it wrong. Stop pressing extrude a zillion times and/or holding the button like an ape. Any machine is a piece of junk when you don’t follow the instructions and operate it like an animal.
Thanks for the replies. Three opinions about how to do it and one is different from the other two, and both are different from Loading filament | Bambu Lab Wiki which is why I kept pushing until filament started coming out.
If you push the Filament into the ptfe after some time you habe a block. In this moment its at the gears from the extruder. You only have to push extruder down until the gears grab the filament. This is minimum 1 time and sometimes 2 times. Then the filament is in the extruder. The rest the machine is doing by itself when starts a print.
You can open the toolhead while you are doing that and you will see exaxctly what is happening. So you will understand when is the machine doing what