I needed desk space badly as my desk of hobby/actual work was completely claimed by the A1 Mini and the AMS Lite doohicky sitting next to it. Together they were taking about three horizontal feet of desk space and I didn’t have six inches of desk I could see that wasn’t 3D printer related or not easily accessible.
I checked the options for compacting the printer and they were wall mount, which was rated “probably the best option” by several people I don’t know, and adding a riser to place the AMS directly over the A1 Mini.
Before I go too far into this story I’ll mention I’ve run two perfect prints and my table does not appear to be shaking around as much, but this may be hopeful thinking.
The print lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 hours – I was out of the office, looked in on Bambu Studio, and there was a printed riser just hanging out living its best life. I got into work today and that was no longer the case – at some point after printing it decided it was going to detach from the plate and make a run for it.
No damage noted I set about removing the printed supports and installing it on the machine. It’s pretty evident what you need to do – remove a top of pole screw, when you remove said screw the top comes off, there’s a plate in there with 3 screws that can be removed with the tools that shipped with the printer, remove that and set the 3 screws aside, and get to screwing them in.
I unloaded all my spools from the AMS because I suspected it was going to be a pain to mount with the spools on, and proceeded to mount it with no real issues. The tubing looked like it was not going to work any more as it was now pretty darn high, but worked fine.
Loaded up, two perfect prints in and with about two feet of additional desk space I’m enjoying it.
I’ll update if I end up with any sub par prints in the next bit, but the added weight seems to have caused the unit to travel less.
Oh yeah, while I cannot find this at the time I’m writing this I ran across a video yesterday while looking for a solution that said that the main problem with this was not being able to access spools 3 & 4 easily. The unit with spools weighs something like 2 fat guinea pigs, just turn the unit if this is a concern.
Today was an interesting day – as I may have mentioned I’m printing up fast removable suite number signs as a work project using a Bambu A1 Mini. Today’s task was to get our logo and a quick left/right directory for an elevator in which you’re given a quick orientation for which way to go when you exit the elevator.
The difficulty was our logo’s font does not exist, it was designed by an artist sometime in the 80s or 90s and we have a couple of high resolution files but no vector graphics. So my challenge was take a high resolution image and turn it into a sign with directional indicators to be placed in an elevator.
I decided I was going to use MakerWorld’s Make My Sign (free) for making this thing which did everything I needed it to do except provide arrows and turn a PDF the size of Rhode Island into an SVG.
For the arrows I just googled “left arrow emoji” and “right arrow emoji” and cut and paste them in a text box because that looked perfect. Placed white text on a dark background and I had everything I needed except our logo.
The task of turning a PDF image into an SVG involved me cutting the logo in Windows using windows-shift-s and pasting it into an MSPaint document, saving as a PNG, then going to PNGtoSVG.com (also free, no registration required, no emailing of link,) and playing with simplifying the logo from multicolor to 1 or 2.
Downloaded the SVG, imported into Make My Sign, resized, positioned, and printed.
Now it’d be really cool if I showed you what I made, but I’m not entirely enthused at the prospect of broadcasting where I work to the world (you can find it easy enough,) so I’ll just throw in the image of the Pocketables printable logo I made while attempting to figure out all the steps required to make my project work.
Fun times. As a note I have printed several suite numbers with the removable contraption but this one was fun and made me a wee bit giddy printing up my company’s logo. Yeah I’m boring.
I’ve got my A1 Mini at work because 1) I’ve got a large work project I am doing on it 2) I have no space at home, and 3) every time that printer is printing I am sneezing. So I use it when I can be in another location.
I started a print on Friday with some brand new PLA from Bambu labs. I had printed a few things earlier in the day and had no problem but then one of the projects I downloaded from Maker World printed so weirdly I aborted it (globs, not sticking to the surface.) I was in a rush and closing down the software and accidentally chose to update preferences and now I get spaghetti.
Womp womp. The above spaghetti is off of a spool which was not the new spool and had been nothing but working prints until I accidentally updated something.
I highly suspect I managed to break the settings on a project, but yeah now I’m trying to figure out how to fix this. Fun time since it’s not at my house and I can’t clear the plate to fix until tomorrow.
So I now know spaghetti detection is not implemented yet on the A1 mini…
Oddly not seeing a lot of help when I’m searching this up other than delete a profile, log back into the program, and do not sync cloud profiles.
Will reveal the amazing solution when I find it. At a little over a month this is the first challenge I’ve faced made more of a challenge by being 8 miles away from me at the moment.
Fix appears to have been close Bambu Studio, open it, log out, log back in, do not sync cloud values and settings. I’m at 3/4ths of an SS Benchy with the new filament and no evident issues.
That said, the spaghetti I was printing up there appears to have been fine through about a quarter of the print and then the base was flung off the textured plate. I now have questions about whether this may be an issue of the print piece not being centered more than a bad setting.
But all appears well with the world at the moment… which is nice because I actually lost sleep trying to retrace my steps
Other possibility is a Dreo fan I recently reviewed was running at an odd number, may have been blowing on the unit and cooling the front of the plate down which is where all my fails seem to have occurred. I suspect Google Assistant misheard something and set it to Tornado.
Last month I picked up a 3D printer, the Bambu A1 Mini. My plans for this are to design two items that simply do not exist, and a project for work. For the moment I’m learning quite a bit and printing up fidget toys and waiting on some black filament for the work project.
So far I’ve had no major disasters, a couple of minor printing errors that I believe were due to shaky table and badly positioned trash bucket, and have been impressed at the point I’ve stepped into the game it appears really user friendly. I guess going on for the past 40 something years have given it a pretty good head start for me.
I had a short vacation during this time, so there’s only a couple of weeks of me playing with the thing but man, the A1 mini has been a really good experience thus far.
A coworker is going to be bringing in another 3D printer that was abandoned by his kids because it was too hard to learn and we’re going to see if his kids just had a problem or if the thing really is that much harder. Supposedly was a good printer, but I’m new to the game so just taking that on what was told to me.
If you’ve ever been curious about it, Bambu’s entry price wasn’t bad, and I’ve so far printed up enough toys to probably have offset the price.
Now my task is to see whether I can actually create what I want to build and it be useful. One of my personal tasks unfortunately requires more print space than I can get with the A1 Mini, so I’ve got to figure out a way to print it in parts and while that doesn’t seem that difficult it’s something I had not factored into my near-impulse buy.
What I am have invented is going to make life slightly better for people in a couple of highly specific situations… if I can figure out how to print a medium sized build on a mini sized printer.
Or maybe it’s crap, but I can probably tell within the next week or two.
Man, I wonder what I would have done when I had more than 5 minutes between interruptions.
Today was an interesting day – as I may have mentioned I’m printing up fast removable suite number signs as a work project using a Bambu A1 Mini. Today’s task was to get our logo and a quick left/right directory for an elevator in which you’re given a quick orientation for which way to go when you exit the elevator.
The difficulty was our logo’s font does not exist, it was designed by an artist sometime in the 80s or 90s and we have a couple of high resolution files but no vector graphics. So my challenge was take a high resolution image and turn it into a sign with directional indicators to be placed in an elevator.
I decided I was going to use MakerWorld’s Make My Sign (free) for making this thing which did everything I needed it to do except provide arrows and turn a PDF the size of Rhode Island into an SVG.
For the arrows I just googled “left arrow emoji” and “right arrow emoji” and cut and paste them in a text box because that looked perfect. Placed white text on a dark background and I had everything I needed except our logo.
The task of turning a PDF image into an SVG involved me cutting the logo in Windows using windows-shift-s and pasting it into an MSPaint document, saving as a PNG, then going to PNGtoSVG.com (also free, no registration required, no emailing of link,) and playing with simplifying the logo from multicolor to 1 or 2.
Downloaded the SVG, imported into Make My Sign, resized, positioned, and printed.
Now it’d be really cool if I showed you what I made, but I’m not entirely enthused at the prospect of broadcasting where I work to the world (you can find it easy enough,) so I’ll just throw in the image of the Pocketables printable logo I made while attempting to figure out all the steps required to make my project work.
Fun times. As a note I have printed several suite numbers with the removable contraption but this one was fun and made me a wee bit giddy printing up my company’s logo. Yeah I’m boring.
I’ve got my A1 Mini at work because 1) I’ve got a large work project I am doing on it 2) I have no space at home, and 3) every time that printer is printing I am sneezing. So I use it when I can be in another location.
I started a print on Friday with some brand new PLA from Bambu labs. I had printed a few things earlier in the day and had no problem but then one of the projects I downloaded from Maker World printed so weirdly I aborted it (globs, not sticking to the surface.) I was in a rush and closing down the software and accidentally chose to update preferences and now I get spaghetti.
Womp womp. The above spaghetti is off of a spool which was not the new spool and had been nothing but working prints until I accidentally updated something.
I highly suspect I managed to break the settings on a project, but yeah now I’m trying to figure out how to fix this. Fun time since it’s not at my house and I can’t clear the plate to fix until tomorrow.
So I now know spaghetti detection is not implemented yet on the A1 mini…
Oddly not seeing a lot of help when I’m searching this up other than delete a profile, log back into the program, and do not sync cloud profiles.
Will reveal the amazing solution when I find it. At a little over a month this is the first challenge I’ve faced made more of a challenge by being 8 miles away from me at the moment.
Fix appears to have been close Bambu Studio, open it, log out, log back in, do not sync cloud values and settings. I’m at 3/4ths of an SS Benchy with the new filament and no evident issues.
That said, the spaghetti I was printing up there appears to have been fine through about a quarter of the print and then the base was flung off the textured plate. I now have questions about whether this may be an issue of the print piece not being centered more than a bad setting.
But all appears well with the world at the moment… which is nice because I actually lost sleep trying to retrace my steps
Other possibility is a Dreo fan I recently reviewed was running at an odd number, may have been blowing on the unit and cooling the front of the plate down which is where all my fails seem to have occurred. I suspect Google Assistant misheard something and set it to Tornado.
Last month I picked up a 3D printer, the Bambu A1 Mini. My plans for this are to design two items that simply do not exist, and a project for work. For the moment I’m learning quite a bit and printing up fidget toys and waiting on some black filament for the work project.
So far I’ve had no major disasters, a couple of minor printing errors that I believe were due to shaky table and badly positioned trash bucket, and have been impressed at the point I’ve stepped into the game it appears really user friendly. I guess going on for the past 40 something years have given it a pretty good head start for me.
I had a short vacation during this time, so there’s only a couple of weeks of me playing with the thing but man, the A1 mini has been a really good experience thus far.
A coworker is going to be bringing in another 3D printer that was abandoned by his kids because it was too hard to learn and we’re going to see if his kids just had a problem or if the thing really is that much harder. Supposedly was a good printer, but I’m new to the game so just taking that on what was told to me.
If you’ve ever been curious about it, Bambu’s entry price wasn’t bad, and I’ve so far printed up enough toys to probably have offset the price.
Now my task is to see whether I can actually create what I want to build and it be useful. One of my personal tasks unfortunately requires more print space than I can get with the A1 Mini, so I’ve got to figure out a way to print it in parts and while that doesn’t seem that difficult it’s something I had not factored into my near-impulse buy.
What I am have invented is going to make life slightly better for people in a couple of highly specific situations… if I can figure out how to print a medium sized build on a mini sized printer.
Or maybe it’s crap, but I can probably tell within the next week or two.
Man, I wonder what I would have done when I had more than 5 minutes between interruptions.
Hi, I’m Paul and I recently discovered I needed to make a few things that apparently don’t exist at the moment. Now, the journey to making those things isn’t this article, this is just about setting up the unit, my first tugboat, and my first print on the first 3D printer I’ve ever had access to.
TL;DR – total noob vs well planned out device
After discussing in the discord channel that I was looking for a 3D printer Bambu Labs was mentioned and I went on to watch a few videos discussing why the A1 Mini was not terrible. I was more interested in the “meh, get it” reviews than the vast majority of the reviews out there saying that it was great. Even people with the absurd systems tended to think at least it was a great starter printer and all around probably pretty decent.
I checked the rave reviews after this and decided that if I had checked them first I probably would have wandered off due to built in positive commercial blocking.
So I decided to order the Bambu Lab A1 Mini Combo and 3 spools of Filament due to there being an anniversary sale (still going on) and that I thought I was ordering 4 spools… eh, my bad.
I placed the order, and maybe two days later I had the spools and notification that the A1 Mini Combo had shipped.
What happened next, only UPS knows as they took possession of it and then it sat with the status “emergency situation or extreme weather” for several days. I wasn’t in a particular rush as I didn’t have the place set up for it and I had a vacation I had to attend to, but Bambu Lab had done their part and I contacted them the day UPS released it and gave a date for delivery.
I wanted to devote 3 hours to setting it up and a first print, so it sat for a few days until I could do this. Based on the pictures I have from unboxing to printing my first tugboat was an hour and 13 minutes. This included several minutes in which the printer went through an initial calibration and noise testing and otherwise did things it will probably not do on a routine basis.
I was a bit surprised at the packaging and setup process. The packaging seemed overkill and includes having to remove 4 screws and an arm that exists solely to prevent movement. This encased in foam, cardboard, etc. I’ve got a trash can full of half recyclable materials here. Maybe better safe than sorry.
Attempting to pair the printer to my Bambu Handy account had some bumps… seems like I had some minor issue creating the account where it would just sit and spin for a minute before giving me an error message and then disappearing. That either cleared up or I chose to log in using Google, I can’t remember which.
My first print started and after gazing at a print head printing stuff for suitably long enough I returned to another project. Things seemed to be going along well so I left it unattended until I heard a weird noise, turned around, and most of the printing part of the unit was off of a table and about to throw itself to the floor.
I didn’t know what to do at this point other than grab the not-hot and not moving parts of it and move it back to the table. As such I believe was the creation of the issues with the back of the boat and at least one line on the front. The unit was not in a stable enough position and was shaking itself silly.
I decided to do a second print and was informed there was an error and that I needed to do run a self test. Wish I’d taken screen shots, but I ended up having to Google it and whatever it did took less than a minute and as it finished I was informed there was a firmware update and chose to take it.
After the firmware update and issues I didn’t have enough time to do a second print that day – it was now saying it wanted me to oil the Y access and I saw no printed documentation for that. Figured I would do that in the morning and print up something one of my children wanted. I did not want to run another print unattended because 1) I had not oiled it yet and wanted to make sure I did everything properly, 2) I did not want to come back to a printer on the ground.
A quick and easy lube later I printed my first Axolotl (highest rated in the Bambu Handy app, I have no idea how to link it yet.) With the printer positioned in a much more stable location and using a different filament I had no visible printing issues like I had previously with the boat.
I fully realize at the end of day 2 I have only reached the point of printing other people’s stuff, but with the time I have been able to devote to it that’s where I expect to be.
My goal tomorrow is to take a logo for my work with a font that does not exist and print up a small door plate. This is going to be interesting because I see how to do it if you have the font, but many moons ago (sometime in the 90’s) work’s logo text was designed and drawn and as such I have PSDs, PDFs, but no fonts.
So far I feel like I’m on a guided adventure with the Bambu Lab A1 Mini Combo… there was the thrill of setting it up, the boat which was there waiting for me (assuming on the SD card,) my first error and having to figure out how to get the printer to do anything (if you say I need to run a self check give me a button to run a self check people,) a requirement for lubricating the Y access after the first print, and who knows what the rest is going to bring as I have grease as well, and a couple of tools that have not be used or referenced yet.
I’ll probably end up shortly making some drawer organizers and lock pick holders because I’m cool like that.
Anyhow, just a story of my first two days… I’m on print #3 now and may trust the unit now that it’s positioned better to print something when I am not in the building.
Today was an interesting day – as I may have mentioned I’m printing up fast removable suite number signs as a work project using a Bambu A1 Mini. Today’s task was to get our logo and a quick left/right directory for an elevator in which you’re given a quick orientation for which way to go when you exit the elevator.
The difficulty was our logo’s font does not exist, it was designed by an artist sometime in the 80s or 90s and we have a couple of high resolution files but no vector graphics. So my challenge was take a high resolution image and turn it into a sign with directional indicators to be placed in an elevator.
I decided I was going to use MakerWorld’s Make My Sign (free) for making this thing which did everything I needed it to do except provide arrows and turn a PDF the size of Rhode Island into an SVG.
For the arrows I just googled “left arrow emoji” and “right arrow emoji” and cut and paste them in a text box because that looked perfect. Placed white text on a dark background and I had everything I needed except our logo.
The task of turning a PDF image into an SVG involved me cutting the logo in Windows using windows-shift-s and pasting it into an MSPaint document, saving as a PNG, then going to PNGtoSVG.com (also free, no registration required, no emailing of link,) and playing with simplifying the logo from multicolor to 1 or 2.
Downloaded the SVG, imported into Make My Sign, resized, positioned, and printed.
Now it’d be really cool if I showed you what I made, but I’m not entirely enthused at the prospect of broadcasting where I work to the world (you can find it easy enough,) so I’ll just throw in the image of the Pocketables printable logo I made while attempting to figure out all the steps required to make my project work.
Fun times. As a note I have printed several suite numbers with the removable contraption but this one was fun and made me a wee bit giddy printing up my company’s logo. Yeah I’m boring.
I’ve got my A1 Mini at work because 1) I’ve got a large work project I am doing on it 2) I have no space at home, and 3) every time that printer is printing I am sneezing. So I use it when I can be in another location.
I started a print on Friday with some brand new PLA from Bambu labs. I had printed a few things earlier in the day and had no problem but then one of the projects I downloaded from Maker World printed so weirdly I aborted it (globs, not sticking to the surface.) I was in a rush and closing down the software and accidentally chose to update preferences and now I get spaghetti.
Womp womp. The above spaghetti is off of a spool which was not the new spool and had been nothing but working prints until I accidentally updated something.
I highly suspect I managed to break the settings on a project, but yeah now I’m trying to figure out how to fix this. Fun time since it’s not at my house and I can’t clear the plate to fix until tomorrow.
So I now know spaghetti detection is not implemented yet on the A1 mini…
Oddly not seeing a lot of help when I’m searching this up other than delete a profile, log back into the program, and do not sync cloud profiles.
Will reveal the amazing solution when I find it. At a little over a month this is the first challenge I’ve faced made more of a challenge by being 8 miles away from me at the moment.
Fix appears to have been close Bambu Studio, open it, log out, log back in, do not sync cloud values and settings. I’m at 3/4ths of an SS Benchy with the new filament and no evident issues.
That said, the spaghetti I was printing up there appears to have been fine through about a quarter of the print and then the base was flung off the textured plate. I now have questions about whether this may be an issue of the print piece not being centered more than a bad setting.
But all appears well with the world at the moment… which is nice because I actually lost sleep trying to retrace my steps
Other possibility is a Dreo fan I recently reviewed was running at an odd number, may have been blowing on the unit and cooling the front of the plate down which is where all my fails seem to have occurred. I suspect Google Assistant misheard something and set it to Tornado.
Last month I picked up a 3D printer, the Bambu A1 Mini. My plans for this are to design two items that simply do not exist, and a project for work. For the moment I’m learning quite a bit and printing up fidget toys and waiting on some black filament for the work project.
So far I’ve had no major disasters, a couple of minor printing errors that I believe were due to shaky table and badly positioned trash bucket, and have been impressed at the point I’ve stepped into the game it appears really user friendly. I guess going on for the past 40 something years have given it a pretty good head start for me.
I had a short vacation during this time, so there’s only a couple of weeks of me playing with the thing but man, the A1 mini has been a really good experience thus far.
A coworker is going to be bringing in another 3D printer that was abandoned by his kids because it was too hard to learn and we’re going to see if his kids just had a problem or if the thing really is that much harder. Supposedly was a good printer, but I’m new to the game so just taking that on what was told to me.
If you’ve ever been curious about it, Bambu’s entry price wasn’t bad, and I’ve so far printed up enough toys to probably have offset the price.
Now my task is to see whether I can actually create what I want to build and it be useful. One of my personal tasks unfortunately requires more print space than I can get with the A1 Mini, so I’ve got to figure out a way to print it in parts and while that doesn’t seem that difficult it’s something I had not factored into my near-impulse buy.
What I am have invented is going to make life slightly better for people in a couple of highly specific situations… if I can figure out how to print a medium sized build on a mini sized printer.
Or maybe it’s crap, but I can probably tell within the next week or two.
Man, I wonder what I would have done when I had more than 5 minutes between interruptions.
Hi, I’m Paul and I recently discovered I needed to make a few things that apparently don’t exist at the moment. Now, the journey to making those things isn’t this article, this is just about setting up the unit, my first tugboat, and my first print on the first 3D printer I’ve ever had access to.
TL;DR – total noob vs well planned out device
After discussing in the discord channel that I was looking for a 3D printer Bambu Labs was mentioned and I went on to watch a few videos discussing why the A1 Mini was not terrible. I was more interested in the “meh, get it” reviews than the vast majority of the reviews out there saying that it was great. Even people with the absurd systems tended to think at least it was a great starter printer and all around probably pretty decent.
I checked the rave reviews after this and decided that if I had checked them first I probably would have wandered off due to built in positive commercial blocking.
So I decided to order the Bambu Lab A1 Mini Combo and 3 spools of Filament due to there being an anniversary sale (still going on) and that I thought I was ordering 4 spools… eh, my bad.
I placed the order, and maybe two days later I had the spools and notification that the A1 Mini Combo had shipped.
What happened next, only UPS knows as they took possession of it and then it sat with the status “emergency situation or extreme weather” for several days. I wasn’t in a particular rush as I didn’t have the place set up for it and I had a vacation I had to attend to, but Bambu Lab had done their part and I contacted them the day UPS released it and gave a date for delivery.
I wanted to devote 3 hours to setting it up and a first print, so it sat for a few days until I could do this. Based on the pictures I have from unboxing to printing my first tugboat was an hour and 13 minutes. This included several minutes in which the printer went through an initial calibration and noise testing and otherwise did things it will probably not do on a routine basis.
I was a bit surprised at the packaging and setup process. The packaging seemed overkill and includes having to remove 4 screws and an arm that exists solely to prevent movement. This encased in foam, cardboard, etc. I’ve got a trash can full of half recyclable materials here. Maybe better safe than sorry.
Attempting to pair the printer to my Bambu Handy account had some bumps… seems like I had some minor issue creating the account where it would just sit and spin for a minute before giving me an error message and then disappearing. That either cleared up or I chose to log in using Google, I can’t remember which.
My first print started and after gazing at a print head printing stuff for suitably long enough I returned to another project. Things seemed to be going along well so I left it unattended until I heard a weird noise, turned around, and most of the printing part of the unit was off of a table and about to throw itself to the floor.
I didn’t know what to do at this point other than grab the not-hot and not moving parts of it and move it back to the table. As such I believe was the creation of the issues with the back of the boat and at least one line on the front. The unit was not in a stable enough position and was shaking itself silly.
I decided to do a second print and was informed there was an error and that I needed to do run a self test. Wish I’d taken screen shots, but I ended up having to Google it and whatever it did took less than a minute and as it finished I was informed there was a firmware update and chose to take it.
After the firmware update and issues I didn’t have enough time to do a second print that day – it was now saying it wanted me to oil the Y access and I saw no printed documentation for that. Figured I would do that in the morning and print up something one of my children wanted. I did not want to run another print unattended because 1) I had not oiled it yet and wanted to make sure I did everything properly, 2) I did not want to come back to a printer on the ground.
A quick and easy lube later I printed my first Axolotl (highest rated in the Bambu Handy app, I have no idea how to link it yet.) With the printer positioned in a much more stable location and using a different filament I had no visible printing issues like I had previously with the boat.
I fully realize at the end of day 2 I have only reached the point of printing other people’s stuff, but with the time I have been able to devote to it that’s where I expect to be.
My goal tomorrow is to take a logo for my work with a font that does not exist and print up a small door plate. This is going to be interesting because I see how to do it if you have the font, but many moons ago (sometime in the 90’s) work’s logo text was designed and drawn and as such I have PSDs, PDFs, but no fonts.
So far I feel like I’m on a guided adventure with the Bambu Lab A1 Mini Combo… there was the thrill of setting it up, the boat which was there waiting for me (assuming on the SD card,) my first error and having to figure out how to get the printer to do anything (if you say I need to run a self check give me a button to run a self check people,) a requirement for lubricating the Y access after the first print, and who knows what the rest is going to bring as I have grease as well, and a couple of tools that have not be used or referenced yet.
I’ll probably end up shortly making some drawer organizers and lock pick holders because I’m cool like that.
Anyhow, just a story of my first two days… I’m on print #3 now and may trust the unit now that it’s positioned better to print something when I am not in the building.