So far I’m having a real good time printing with my X1. The only thing that is bothering me, is the very weak wifi receipt of the printer. Sending stuff to the printer works fine, but watching the camera feed is next to impossible. The app mostly says ‘connection failed’.
It’s located within 3m from an accespoint. Even with a free line of sight. The wifi network is 2.4ghz only for my iot stuff.
Is this a common issue? Is there anything I can do to improve this? I think maybe something’s wrong with the wifi antenna(?) of the printer.
My accesspoint is wired. Not a repeater. I don’t have a suitable app that reads signal strength, but my iPhone shows full wifi-strength next to the printer when connected to the 2.4ghz network. The display on the printer shows 0/1 bar for wifi strength.
Sadly Apple doesn’t allow WiFi apps in the App Store, they’re concerned about hacking tools and some of the ones on Android give a lot of info about the networks, not just signal strength, so I see their point. As a tech I have Android (most techs do for this and other reasons).
Well it sure does sound like you’ve got a problem there. Just for fun, might I suggest you try (if possible) rotating the printer 90° each way and see if it changes? Even if it’s not a position you’d use, just as a test.
WiFi is so d@mn touchy that sometimes a foot of movement or a change in attitude of the antenna makes a difference. IDK if you know of TV “rabbit ears” but it’s the same principle, it is radio.
Only other choice is BL Support. You may have a bad antenna, or the wire to the WiFi board was defective or damaged during assembly (they’re very small wires, and easily damaged, ask me how I know … ) or the board itself is bad, although that is possible, it also is the least likely.
Bad antenna or connections is the most frequent failure point, the connectors are tiny and easily damaged or not fully seated. I haven’t looked at it, but I’d bet there’s a connector on the board and also on the antenna if they didn’t opt for an antenna on the board.
Old post but I also have had really poor wifi performance. That is, until I changed my channel with on the 2.4 GHZ radio from 20 to 40. I have Unifi U-AP-Pro units and It was done through the unifi controller.
If you have the option in your wifi settings, give it a try.
Recently replaced wifi module in my x1c after connection slowly diminished from full bars to ‘connection failed’ at ~200 hours total print time on this machine. Tried all the troubleshooting steps suggested by Bambu after ‘connection failed’ started to pop up. Phone hotspot and router right next to printer with no luck. Operating distance of printer to router in my office is 9’ with clear line of sight.
A new wifi module is 6$ CAD and is relatively easy to replace. I stuck my new module on the outside of the case by routing the wire out by the upper door hinge. Recommend a 90* dental pick or something similar if you want to avoid using a hairdryer to get past the silicone glue and fiber tape that’s directly above the door.
Wish I had done it sooner when I first noticed the camera connection suffering but the slow death of the antenna made me overthink it and I waited until ‘connection failed’.
Hope this helps anyone else trying to diagnose wifi issues.
Did you manage to get your X1 (or P1?) to actually utilize 40MHz bandwidth?
When I check in my Unifi controller webpage it is connected as 20MHz.
But i assume 40MHz helps other units not hog the bandwidth as much when Bambu needs it for video.
There are only 3 non-overlapping channels on 2.4GHz. If you have neighbors or live nearby any other networks, you could actually make performance worse by increasing the channel width as it could raise the potential for co-channel interference. This is one reason folks are complaining that 5GHz wasn’t an option.
WiFi Analyzer is a good app on Android to see Wi-Fi by channel in your area.
I didn’t do anything special to get it to work after changing to a wider channel. Ultimately, I don’t think this made that much difference. The video is generally more smooth but It started misbehaving again after a couple of days and now I occasionally have to just disable wifi and reenable it then it works again for a while.
When you experience strangely weak Wifi reception, please check whether the Wifi Antenna is properly connected to the main board. In my case, the wire of the antenna got seperated from the connector on the board. A simple replacement fixed this.
I experienced the same thing as @HenkJan mentioned. Wifi signal started out great and slowly got worse, sitting right next to the router. I bought a new antenna with the plan to replace it whenever the old one finally quite. That day finally came, went to replace the board and found the wire was disconnected. Reconnected it firmly, boom, full signal again. No need to replace the board. So if you have an issue, maybe just pop off the side panel and push on the back of the antenna snap connector.
I too had an issue with a weak Wifi operation. It worked properly only when AP was next to the X1. Strangely enough, X1 seems to see the AP but just can’t talk to it reliably.
Upon investigation, I noticed that the cable coming from the antenna had disconnected from the connector at the PCB end. I was hoping that it would be something simple like detached connector, but unfortunately no.
So I guess it is time to replace the wifi antenna assembly, it looks like that there is no simple way to reattach the cable to the connector. Don’t know if that was just a poor quality control by whoever makes these antenna assemblies, or did it become damaged by a rough handling when the printer was assembled.
An update to my situation, I have since replaced the WiFi antenna assembly, and now the Wifi connection works as expected. Signal levels improved considerably (something like 40 dB!) at the AP end. Before the replacement, signal levels were extremely low, borderline of working at all. So if you are having problems, in addition of ensuring that connector is properly plugged in, I suggest giving the WiFi antenna connector end cable a slight pull with tweezers, to see if it detaches from the connector too easily. That was the problem I had.
The wi-fi connection had become touch-and-go, and the network camera no longer worked. For some reason just power cycling the printer restored everything back to normal. Go figure.
What finally worked best for me was giving my X1C its own dedicated repeater. If I move the X1C, the repeater goes with it. It gets confused if it has more than one thing it can connect with, as in a mesh network: given any choice at all, it may not choose wisely which node to bond with.
) or the board itself is bad, although that is possible, it also is the least likely.