A friend contacted me about donating his Prusa Mk3 S2 to the local school since he now has a Bambu X1 Carbon so I had to dig into that machine more. And wow, they nailed the hardware in all kinds of ways.
It’s VERY fast since they implemented a double CoreXY design. So the part only moves down and not forwards/backwards on the Y axis like the i3 design Prusa has stuck with.
They are using a proper part cooling fan. ie a centrifugal fan rather than the typical bladed fan. Centrifugal fans do high pressure better so can produce a narrow high speed cooling jet to get heat away better.
added centrifugal fan on the side of the case blowing across the entire heatbed for extra PLA cooling.
direct drive extruder so it’ll handle all kinds of filament well, including rubbery ones
Even has a little LiDAR module on the print head which is used to analyze some calibration prints and adjust extruder parameters. Nice if it works well and I’d not be surprised if it’s built from a commodity mouse chip so likely not an expensive addon.
See the link below, it’s quite an impressive design/machine. Seeing they have a 4 core CPU and a 2 core MCU I have to wondering if their claimed “rewire” of their firmware isn’t based on something like an rPi and Klipper. They claim to have a 2 TOP AI processor so maybe even something like a Google Coral board instead of rPi.
Except for the proprietary software on the machine it’s an impressive design. Granted, it’s another 50% more than a Prusa MK4( ~$1000 ) at ~$1500 but it also is alot more machine.
The Prusa XL is a core XY machine and they’ve said that in a couple of weeks they’re shipping input shaping and pressure advance (the software parts that makes Vorons and X1 Carbons fast) so it isn’t that Prusa can’t do core XY. That said, the Prusa XL is $2k and has long lead times so it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
I’m disappointed that the mk4 is still i3-ish but once they ship the new firmware I’m hoping that the speeds aren’t quite as bad compared to the X1 Carbon.
I don’t yet know what speeds the X1 Carbon prints at but I just added input shaping to my Ender3 after adding a 32bit board and Marlin 2.1.2.1 and saw some run that i3 at 200mm/s with good results. But there has to be a limit because the i3 moves the Y axis which holds the build object so you can’t move so fast as to wobble the part off the bed. Limited by design. But we are also talking about a $1000 machine vs a $1500. Oh, I guess the MK4 with the MMU3 would put them in the same ball park.
Good to hear Prusa is doing a Core XY and now that more are doing 32bit controllers there’s lots more room for advances besides motion control stuff.
Lots of great videos on YouTube pointing out the pros and cons of the Bambu. Depending on how you look at it, the biggest issue is the filament waste when changing filaments. That may or may not be a problem depending on what filaments you’re using and how much they cost per gram.
My buddy is getting into testing of the filament flushing being set in infill and supports. There’s a good distance between the filament spools and the extruder.
Wow. It looks like Bambu is using unencrypted FTP for shipping stuff around. Here’s a blog entry that starts to tear into the hardware and firmware a bit.
Even if I was OK with their cavalier attitude to open source and intellectual property, I’d be wary of using their stuff for printing anything I didn’t want to be public.
Yes, I’d heard of that disregard for basic security issue but also that once it was exposed they fixed the issue. I noticed the post was from 7 Jan '23 but unfortunately didn’t update on the fix.
The fix wasn’t super quick since they posted a statement on 25 Nov '22 about it.
I don’t know and from the review I recently read, albeit a year old, they didn’t have a way to run without an Internet connection or drive directly from the forked Prusa Slicer application. I do admire their efforts in the hardware design side but ya, their software side doesn’t look so well.
They did not build the Linux version of the slicer.
Did you see there is a filament cutter lever on the left side of the hot end(looking at the front)? When the filament color is changed, the head moves to the front left side of the machine, pushed the lever by moving the head against the corner which cuts the filament right above the hotend. Then the filament is swapped and new filament pushes down on the cut end in the purge. So probably an extra 2 or 3 cm of filament has to be purged to get around issues of blobs on the end of the filament getting stuck in the small diameter teflon tubing as it’s pulled back.
So I just got a Prusa MK2.5S with MMU1 from the friend who purchased the Bambu. Finally got it dialed in and did a little calibration squares in squares I’d made but colored one inner wall to test the MMU using 2 colors. When I saw the wipe tower and how long and large it was I got the idea of a different wipe tower and have been looking for how to implement it in Prusa Slice. My idea was to make a small “T” shaped wipe tower where the wiping goes like this:
Move past the wipe tower at the current layer and purge the old filament in mid air
build two perimeters on the “T” starting with the short lower leg of the “T” and then doing the long top which is positioned tangent to the build plate objects
Continue with the next layer/color of the gcode.
The thought is to purge the full diameter of the nozzle instead of purging at only the layer height and under pressure. I don’t know if it will speed anything up but it should speed it up some and the wipe tower should be able to be much smaller so will take up less build plate space. I noticed in a video I saw today that the Bambu does a full in-air nozzle purge into that “poop shute” and has a teflon wiper it cleans the nozzle off with. The teflon wiper does what I’m hoping the small “T” shaped tower does.
FWIW, I’m running the Bambu Studio slicer on Fedora with no fuss other than one of my machines failing to load the network plugin for some unknown reason.
Interesting since I’d went to Bambu Labs site and checked their Bambu Studio downloads and it only stated Windows and Mac. A review from last year said they they were only releasing a Windows version and was hopeful a Mac version would follow. Are you maybe running Orca as opposed to Bambu Studio?
There is a linux based slicer for the Bambu machine and it’s called Orca. It is a fork of Bambu Studio which is a fork of Prusa Slicer with bits of Super Slicer and Prusa Slicer is a fork of Slic3r. I did not see a packaged binary of Bambu Studio for Linux and only saw them list Windows and Mac versions. Orca has all supported.
