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.
People already had these when bambu started enshittifying. They might have bought a cheap voron kit, if they had known.
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.
It’s a hack but not one that achieves the intended goal: a printer with Bambu level quality without the Bambu control. I don’t see the problem with pointing that out. It’s also not unexpected as the hardware of the printers, while good quality, is not really unusual. The magic is in the software and you’re completely cutting that out by replacing the mainboard.
Of course the solution is simple, remove it from the internet and do it the old fashioned way with a Pi running OctoEverywhere or similar. Files can be uploaded to the printer via FTP. Does require a somewhat older firmware. Or install X1Plus and set it to LAN+Shield mode. Either way you do lose the Bambu Handy app functionality.
I came to the same conclusion.
Not the”proper” X1C I was hoping for.
It’s a step. It’s not the whole journey.
They already owned a X1C, before bambu started enshittifying. So why not make use of it instead of buying a new cheap kit?
I was considering getting an X1C a while back, and trying to understand whether the locked-downness would be a dealbreaker; this video would have answered my question immediately.
So it’s absolutely a useful hack – not for people who want to jailbreak their existing printer, but for people wondering if / why they want a Voron instead in the first place.
Yeah, I can’t recommend them anymore (and I love my X1C), but it’s clear that BL is intent on adding more and more restrictions to the system over time. And they’re directly violating the PrusaSlicer GPLv3 license now.
You”re on crack, changing the nozzle isn’t required but there is an of the shelf replacement, the E3D Revo with thread in nozzles, no hacking necessarily, printing ABS partS that look better than this that come out of Statasys printer and Formlabs SLS machines, buy a heater and insulate unit, phenomenal results….
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.
Maybe you meant this one? https://xkcd.com/619/
I love how that punchline has aged. Who does use full screen flash video these days?
I should find a way to transcode the ‘Princess’ episodes…might have to vid cap.
I case people forgot, the flash people paid Parker and Stone to produce a series of flash videos.
They made two.
The flash guys said, ‘Don’t make any more, in fact destroy those, you can keep the money.’
But somehow they leaked…real shame.
My favorite character is ‘body checker guy’, he’s cool.
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.
It’s funny as I ordered a Bambulab hotend for my Anycubic printer. Anycubic’s are also locked down. Even worse than Bambulab’s at the moment, but some hero made the Rinkhals firmware for them that runs on the original motherboard.
The printers can be jailbroken, but as you can set your printer to offline mode, there is no need to. The only frustrations I have are impossibly to search error codes, and a general lack of space inside the printer to work on them. But that may be an enclosed CoreXY flaw than a Bambu issue.
thats why I avoid bambulab at all cost, not because the products, but because their business politics, same like DJI. who knows next year they strict you to only use their filaments.
The X1C isn’t very good, especially compared to the P1P/P1S that preceeded it.
Creality is doing a better job at ‘entry level’ high end printers with better temperatures, better build size, and a far easier to replace nozzle.
And despite Creality’s weirdness, they are still closer to open source than Bambu is
The P1 series came out after the X1
I stand corrected!
I might have to dispute the “excellent printers” statement. I have a P1S with AMS and an X1 mini and part way through the job the X1 Mini reverses the filament out of the head too far and then complains that the filament must be stuck and on the P1S the AMS jams at the head every time it tries to feed even though I can manually feed just fine.
So at least the P1S still works, but after this it’s probably a different vendor for me. Maybe back to Prusa if they can catch back up.
The other thing that cracks me up is that for all the sensors the thing has on it it totally doesn’t tell me that I forgot to put the build plate back and prints spaghetti anyway.
I call be on it not knowing the plate is in. That’s literally the 1st thing it checks for before printing, before bed leveling and before flow calibration. It scans the QR code of the plate.
It’s a feature that can be turned off. So 100% user error.
Good for him for showing a Bambu hacking video, but I’m kinda done with hacking them. It took seven years and going through eight 3D printers to finally get the print quality and materials I wanted all along.
Your results may vary, but for me the X1C eliminated the printer mods, failed prints, and tweaks — it just works.