Bambu Labs make indisputably excellent printers. However, that excellence comes at the cost of freedom. After a firmware release earlier this year, Bambu printers could only work with Bambu’s own slicer. For [Proper Printing], this was unacceptable, so printer modification was in order.
First on the plate was the pesky Bambu Labs nozzle. They are a pain to replace, and specialty sizes like 1.8mm are nonexistent. To remedy this flaw, a Bambu Labs compatible heat sink, an E3D V6 ring heater, and a heat break assembly are required. The ring heater was needed for clearance with the stock Bambu shroud. With the help of a 3D-printed jig, fresh holes were cut and tapped into the heat sink to make room for the E3D heat break. Some crimping to salvaged connectors and a bit of filing on the heat sink for wire routing, and Bob’s your uncle!
But this was just the tip of the iceberg. To complete this project, the entire printer needed to run on FOSS firmware. To that end, a fan was sacrificed to mount a Big Tree Tech control board. Most everything ended up connecting to the new board without issue, except for the extruder. The X1’s extruder runs over some kind of communication protocol, presumably CAN bus. So instead, [Proper Printing] made a custom mount for the ubiquitous Orbiter extruder. The whole project was nicely tied up with a custom-made screen mount.
After much debugging, the printer does, in fact, live and print. The parts it creates are OK at best, especially considering the effort put into the printer. But there are other ways of printer liberation, so if you have an X1 Carbon in need of hacking, make sure to check out [Joshua Wise’s] journey to custom X1 firmware!
Mkay,
so new control board,
new extruder,
So its not an X1C anymore. Its a cobbled together DIY printer with an overpriced base. Should have just bought a cheap voron kit.
So…
HaD posts something practical, and the comment is “Not a hack!”
HaD posts something that is a hack, and the comment is “Not practical!”
Nobody is forcing you to replicate this.
I could swear there was an xkcd along the lines of “I installed Linux on my iPod!” “Can it play MP3s?” “No, but I can ping localhost!” years and years and years back, but I’ve never actually been able to find it.
https://xkcd-search.typesense.org/
How about the XKCD search engine.
Nice, didn’t know this one, thanks, alas, the status quo goes unchanged.
The highly skilled hack shows how unhackable the Bambu printers are by design. Proprietary hotend and mainboard are no gos. On Maker Fair I had some talks with Bambu owners (visitors, no exhibitors) and when I pointed to the issues with monthly payments ahead, the answer was usually: The community will find a hack. Not sure how many of them are actually skilled enough to transform the core elements of their printer.