I completely understand your frustration, no, I really really do, but have you ever bought a frozen pizza and on the label it says “Great pizza, except the hamburger tastes like dog food”. Or bought a Kia or Hyundai and on the window sticker it says “Easiest car in the US to steal, 3 years running!”. How about buying a bottle of Vodka that says “100% Corn Based, triple distilled, causes excruciating headaches the next morning”.
Manufacturer’s always mention the best parts of their products and “fail to mention” other issues. That is the way things go. Have you ever walked into a job interview and told them honestly everything you have ever done wrong at your previous jobs?
While I totally agree that it stinks when things don’t live up to their hype, I think it is pretty naive to completely believe the advertising.
Hey, really sorry to hear about the mess with your A1 mini. But let’s be real, this whole convo was kinda doomed from the start… No dice on trying any of the fixes suggested. Plus, it threw me for a loop that you ghosted on your other ticket you mentioned earlier.
BambuLab’s been pretty clear in their press stuff and interviews that they’re not exactly where they wanna be with the printer and its ecosystem. But they’re working on it. Most folks would agree that, all things considered, it’s a smoother experience with the A1 mini than many other printers out there.
Yeah, waiting for BambuLab’s support can be a nightmare, won’t argue there. But in my case, once they finally did get in touch, they were quick to respond to follow-ups and really helped me sort out my issues. (Just speaking from my own run-ins with them.) But like any 3D printer, these aren’t plug-and-play gadgets. It takes time and effort to tweak and fine-tune everything. The only printers I can think of that are basically hassle-free are the Markforged desktop series. But, man, you pay through the nose for that luxury.
No one’s twisting your arm to stick with BambuLab, but you gotta see why some folks get ticked off with these never-ending negative threads. ■■■■ happens, no need to lose sleep over it. Hope you managed to ship yours back and get your refund sorted out soon.
Too bad if people are tired of it. If you don’t have anything to add, you’re just as free to leave the thread alone. I’ve tried the solutions offered here, I’m not sure what you mean about the “no dice” part
I’m not sure you read before you replied here, I’ve bought and built Duet, klipper and marlin printers that printed better and more reliably from day 1. Bambu hasn’t been clear about anything but telling everyone how perfect their product is. I didn’t just buy a printer and get mad when it wasn’t perfect out of the box.
Their bastardized version of prusaslicer is a great place to start looking at the lies. It takes a ton of control away from users that prusaslicer has, with no benefit.
How about the printer crashing itself when you start a print without homing first? This is a BAD product that wasn’t ready to go to market.
Well, for all I can see in the thread, you kinda did.
Feel free to use any other slicer to get whatever control you want to get.
Literally printed 5 prints on every one of my 9 A1 series printers today with only doing bed levelling once in the morning. No issues. Nobody is saying nothing is wrong with your unit, but you can’t generalise that. No clue why you would skip homing and expect a reasonable result. (I guess you mean bed levelling.)
There is an ongoing issue with the Z-Axis hitting the top end of the rail after printing larger objects, but that will not do harm to the printer, just some horrible sounds. (There are some threads with custom gcode that will fix that for you if its a big issue for you.)
No I don’t mean bed leveling. The Z axis crashes at the top of it’s travel when the queued print auto-homes the machine if your last print was tall enough. (Also that auto-home at the beginning of a print is why you don’t have to home a machine between every print. It should be in the start gcode for every printer in every slicer, bambu or prusa or cura or orca or whatever).
The printers are purported to be good out-of-the-box, and they don’t live up to the promises made. It’s a simple matter of bambu saying one thing and doing another. That’s called a lie where I come from.
There is a choice you have to make when you start to blindly move and don’t have limit switches, either bump into the bed, or the top. Since you could damage something on the plate, the obvious choice is to go up first. Again, its just stalled stepper motor noise. nothing to worry about.
Again, you can’t generalise that. There are many people here that had a great experience with their first few prints. Apparently something is broken on your unit. Get in touch with Support and figure it out. There is nothing anyone here can do to help.
And remember, patience and friendliness will get you a long way whenever you want to get something from them.
Yeah, it’s been a great experience out of the box for me. Granted only my second printer. But it was 10 minute setup, about 20 minutes to install latest update and calibrate and then has been printing perfectly since then (only about a dozen prints in the week though).
Real printers have hardcoded travel limits for ends of axes that don’t have endstops. This is true of a $99 Ender 3. It would not crash under the same circumstances. Stalled steppers are not “nothing to worry about” either, they create back voltage and potentially damage a controller board and/or stepper driver.
The hardware is pretty nice, it doesn’t seem broken at all. The problems are in the soft/firmware. Things like travel limits should be done before shipping units. My axes shouldn’t be crashing out of the box, no matter how well-regarded or unproven the rest of the printer is.
And I should say, all the parts on the included SD card come out real nice. I was very optimistic at first, but everything fell apart pretty quickly.
Your “real” printer must be something special. I don’t have one, so I can’t show you, but the last time I checked, the Ender 3 has a Z-Axis Limit switch. The strategy is to move the Z-Axis down until the switch is triggered. Tell me, if you are blind, and someone moves you to an unfamiliar place while you sleep, how do you orient yourself?
The stepper feedback needs a few cycles to be enabled. Sure, it could, and in most cased should not move the printhead so far up. But that could potentially lead to a smaller build volume.
You should not move any axis super fast by hand, that will in fact create a high back voltage. But I guarantee you, they tested the hell out of the stepper controllers, ensuring that the slow homing sequence would not cause any issues.
Well, something must be up, either in your surrounding or something hardware related. But since you did not share any print failures or specific issues/followup, there is nothing anybody can do to help. (Still no reply on this ticket)
Let us know if you are going to keep the printer and need any assistance.
You misunderstand. I’ve experienced crashes with no human intervention involved, only bambu and orca gcode.
To my point tho, an ender or cr-10 or whatever doesn’t go the opposite direction of the endstop for more than a few mm to let the switch open if the bed is already at the end of it’s travel.
Not the case on the bambu.
You’re the guy who thinks stepper back voltage doesn’t do anything, right? Can’t imagine why I wouldn’t take your advice
You’re not working on many challenging prints if that’s the case. Try printing some 70A TPU and tell me how it goes for you. I hope you figure out what I haven’t
