Third party filament library needed

hey @BambuLab … Hope to see soon some third party filament profiles!

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You expect BL to do that for you ? Any idea how many different brands there are ? How many different types of filament for each brand are available ? Additional each country has local producers of filament which again produces a lot of different types of filament. This can add up to something like thousands of different profiles. This will not work. How about some work from your side and provide profiles here or elsewhere ? Good idea, no ? Profiles may also differ depending on type of print surface used. With the hiugh amount of third party print plates, how should they keep up with that ? You see, a little bit of work from users side is required.

But there is always the possibility for Bambu Lab to ask only the major filament brands if they would like to create profiles for their filaments to be integrated in Bambu Studio. The work for Bambu Lab would be greatly limited and for the users it would be convenient, there would be only a few adjustments to make.
Why are there profiles for Polymaker and only Polymaker ??? :wink:

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@mr1952 If you are not Bambu, and you aren’t doing anything about the profiles. Then why bother to answer with pedantic remarks.

“How about some work from your side” You’ve gotta be kidding with that comment.

Bambu is a commercial product, the more profiles they have the more compatible they are with third party filaments, the more useful their product becomes for everyone. They already include some. I bet they have a lab to do that. I don’t.

Take a deep breath and be happy bro!

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Agreed 100%.

This is my train of thought for why they might do it.

Simply because there are other, more important things for them to do. Setting up a profile is a pretty easy thing. As you say, it is a commercial product which includes filament that they sell. Moreover, many people here in my country are using filament from local brand which do not sell outside, nor ship outside. So how can that be done ? There is a coimmunity list for brands suitable for the AMS, this is a good example for community to enter information about profiles.

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The “major filament brands” can create profiles and provide them to Bambu. Is that what you are suggesting ? That would be a good idea

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Bambu Studio is an open source project. It would be great for users to be able to contribute other filament types. I’m sure a somewhat curated list (maybe people could upvote/downvote) wouldn’t be too tough. For that matter, I could imagine making it as a totally separate third-party site that tracks the filament, and could just spit out a config file that I could load into my printer and slicer.

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Indeed. This is THE proposal in that respect. This reminds me of Ideamaker.io where users do exactly that. One user provides his settings and other users of Ideamker can download same or not.

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And the less money Bambu make selling filament. Heck conventional printer manufacturers like HP, Canon, Epson etc do all they can with with embedded encrypted chips to make it impossible to use 3rd party inks.

Also if you think filament manufactures are going to produce custom profiles for Bambu printers then why aren’t they? Studio has export and import functions. Bambu Labs doesn’t need to be involved at all.

Alright. There might be a million opinions for this issue. Mine is that Bambu will benefit more if they do some popular third party filaments.

Companies Like Prusa, make Prusa Slicer (Which is actually what Bambu Labs Slicer is forked from, which they in turn forked from Slic3r project). In Prusa Slicer they have a ton of third party filaments that they have tested in their lab and have published to get the best and optimal results on their printers.

Prusa also makes a wide selection of filaments of their own brand (prusament). That doesn’t stop them from creating profiles for the Prusa community.

I understand that we don’t need the factory to create custom profiles. I had created a few, but they are far from perfect and tuned. It would be awesome to have factory tuned profiles for popular filaments.

I won’t blame them if they won’t do it, but I will bet that it is in their best interest to support them. It gives their printer more reliability, less support calls, better reviews and ultimately… Better user experience which is what they are all about.

When my profiles are tuned, I will of course share them to whoever might be interested in getting them.

I will also look into creating a repository for third party filament info.

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“Studio has export and import functions. Bambu Labs doesn’t need to be involved at all.”

I guess the request is that these profiles appear in the standard list of available profiles. I.e. become part of the software setup.

I am actually printing right now a variety of different brands and types, basically all left overs from the previous printers history and I must say that with a little bit of thinking and testing, it is quite easy to start from the generic profile and end up with a good one for daily use. What should be done as one of the last tests is the test to find out a good volumetric speed. It does not take much to find a good profile and it is fun also

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People act like this is a stupid idea but Ultimaker has had it in Cura for literally 4 years. The major players provide tuned profiles and the community can share their own. It’s part of their plugin menu where you can select addons, plugins, and profiles. It works brilliantly.

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The problem is that there are too many filament brands and as @nickt mentionned, users could contribute with filament profiles. And if bambu made profiles for the “major filament brands” like Polymaker, it wouldn’t be useful for every users because not everyone can afford a 50 € / 50 $ filament spool. Plus, Polymaker gives many ideal printing parameters for their filaments, so it’s not that difficult to make a profile for their filament. But for other brands which are not as big as Polymaker, users have to make their own profiles and they could share it with Bambu and maybe validated by other users. But a profile is not only specific to the filament used but also to the printing conditions (where is the printer sitting, temparture and humidity of the room), the bed used etc.

there are a few limited Polymaker profiles because there was a high profile issue with printing Polymaker filament early in the release. It was damage control of sorts.

I only wish Atomic would downside their huge spools onto something I can put in the AMS instead of having to rewind them onto Bambu size spools. Atomic prints fine for me with Default PLA profile.

What I would like to see Bambu opening is the ability to add custom / self made profiles to the AMS. Once you get used to profiling your filaments, it isn’t really a lot of work. Even if there would be further profiles available as standard presets, you still have to fine tune them based sometimes on even a specific batch of production. And if finetuning is necessary, any generic profil (which they made very conservative) of the same family type is good enough as starting point.

But sure, it is always a matter of personal preferences.

I’m happy with the AMS as it is out of the box because it’s nothing like Prusa MMU2 and having to deal with using an RMU or the Prusa Buffer :grin:

Not that somebody misunderstands me :slight_smile: I’m also happy with the AMS working out of the box. I only mentioned that it would be more convenient if we could add custom profile names to the AMS internal memory on the machine.
I can - and it works as indended - as it is currently, but having selected ‘Generic’, Polymaker or Bambu PLA in the AMS as a fire and forget option and remember in the slicer which filament I have currently loaded in the AMS is not the most user-friendly option :slight_smile:
That is the reason for my ‘request’.

So much potential and added value if a good filament library would exist. Especially for people who had printers before and are maybe even used to this level of customer experience like Prusa filament libraries would be much faster to jump completely to bambulab.

Right now my Prusa is still running 24/7 because the learning curve and missprints on the x1c with various different filaments is still a pain and i didn’t optimize my custom profiles to an extend where i would say that’s my new best setting

I love the x1c and the ams bit still that is a serious point of disappointment that so much profile tuning is needed.

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