I’m starting to run up against the printer’s small build volume. This is my first 3D printer, and I was attracted to the easy out of the box experience. I actually intended to buy the A1, but got its smaller cousin by mistake. I could have sworn I clicked the right button, but everything from the emailed receipt to my order history on the Bambu Lab website says I ordered the mini.
I decided to keep the printer even though I knew I’d eventually outgrow it. I told myself this was my toe in the water for this hobby, and I’d re-evaluate in 6 months to a year whether upgrading to a larger printer would be worth it.
I bought the printer in November, and since then Bambu Lab has begun the enshittification of their products[1]. If I upgrade, it will have to be to a different brand.
So I like the A1 mini’s ease of use and no brainer setup, but don’t like its small build volume, the new restrictions placed on it by the manufacturer, and the fact that the printer is not enclosed. A better camera is a nice-to-have but not necessary. Any suggestions for an upgrade?
Follow-up question so as not to double-post, IIRC the A1 mini was not included in the initial enshittification rollout earlier this year. I put my printer in LAN mode and blocked outgoing traffic from its IP on my network as a precautionary measure anyway upon hearing the announcement. Have the changes made to the other products trickled down to the mini yet? Can I safely upgrade still or should I keep it isolated? ↩︎
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First, leave the mini on the current firmware if you enjoy using Orca. Mine is locked to 1.04 and on LAN.
I’m a Prusa fan boy, so I would recommend the Core 1. If I was starting over, that’s what I would buy. But there a some other good choices out there.
Qidi often gets over looked, They have the Plus 4 and now the Q2 both can be used with the Qidi box, their ams knockoff.
The Elegoo Centari Carbon has been more good than bad it seems, but it seems there have been complaints about the klipper version it runs is locked so vanilla klipper won’t run on it. And Elegoo won’t release the open source parts of the code to allow it. YMMV
The new Snapmaker is interesting, but I would be wary until it gets out into the wild and the great unwashed masses start breaking it before I would invest.
Crealty has upped their game, but I’m personally still wary.
How would you rank your choices?
I ranked them pretty much in the order I have them. Snapmaker might be a tiny bit above the Carbon, but it needs to be see yet. It seems Qidi is also making it difficult to run vanilla Klipper on the new Q2. But they have been very good about open software in the past. Owners of the Q2 aren’t complaining yet. So perhaps they are just slow. Again, YMMV.
What is really scary is Bambu’s new H2 series. Bambu is building a new eco-system with them. And the waiting to be released H2 automatic nozzle changing system is going to break 3D printing I believe. Instead of a traditional tool changer like the Prusa XL or Snapmaker’s version, Bambu is going to just swap the nozzles. Which makes for a far more compact and noticeably cheaper system. This appears to be the first real original idea Bambu has designed vs using already developed ideas.
No matter what you think about Bambu’s business practices, you need to give them flowers for the disruption of the status quo and then delivering good hardware to back it up. It took several years for manufacturers to catch up with the AMS systems that everyone and their brother offers now. Bambu even got Crealty to up their QC and offerings. And now a new idea tool change system? It’s about to get real for the rest of the field…
About the second question, yes, now for “safety”, only bambu slicer can directly send prints to the a1 mini, it got the enshittification update too.
I started it with the A1 mini, then got a Sovol sv08, then aP1S, after selling the A1m. If you can afford it, keep yours, I miss mine. Yes, its too small for some things, but unbeatable for everything that fits on it’s build plate.
What exactly does the mini do that makes it worth keeping if I get a larger printer? I’m not sure I can justify owning more than one.
Might be a setup error on my part, but the P1S has had more print quality problems than my A1m. Also, when iterating on new drafts, I find it useful to have 2 printers to print staggered versions, reducing my wait times. Again, if you don’t have the resources to keep it, sell it by all means. After all, that’s what I did. But i do sometimes miss it’s simplicity and ease of use. Going back to your first question, i just never updated my a1m, nor my p1s, so they both worked fine with Orca slicer. The app and online functionality still works
What’s your budget and target size? I love my Qidi max3. I just got an elegoo centari for my dad and so far it seems decent.
Here’s another vote for the X-Max 3. Mine has been quite solid.
If anyone is interested in multi color support, though, it seems that the Qidi “Box” filament changer deal will never be made compatible with the Max series, and will only work with the new/current Plus 4. There is at least one third party solution for this in the CoPrint ChromaSet thingy, but this engenders some pretty significant compromises and also locks you into using their nozzles, in addition to reducing the print volume significantly which kind of defeats the purpose of the X-Max 3.
If you have any AMS-ish aspirations, the X-Plus 3 and X-Max 3 are probably out of the running.
I was going to say about 10x10x10 inches, but after recalculating the dimensions of the latest thing I’m making (a pill bottle organizer) I may be able to squeeze it onto the mini, so the thing that prompted this post may be a non issue, at least for now. Continued suggestions are welcome though.
Snapmaker U1 kickstarter is on right now. Watch some videos on how the preview units went and then consider that.
Or the Elegoo Centauri Carbon is getting a ton of recommendations. No multi-color addon yet, but it should be released soon. We have no idea if it’ll work well or not, though.
I still love my A1 and A1 Mini and use them a lot. Like you, I’ve frozen them in time. And I use Orca with them. But I’m not actually afraid to upgrade. I think the “dev mode” will probably be fine, and I actually expect to have to update eventually anyhow. I think Orca will probably eventually update to only use the “dev mode” interface and not work with older firmwares. I can’t see them maintaining 2 different ways to connect to a proprietary printer.
I forgot about dev mode. How does that compare to pre-enshittified firmware?
I don’t know yet, but I’ll have to see if I can find people who will describe it fully before I upgrade my firmware. I’m definitely not looking forward to that.
Or OrcaSlicer decides to stop bothering with locked down, enshittified hardware. Who knows.
Required build volume? Multi Material needed? Want to print any fancy filaments? Out of the box product or hobby engineer? Any other requirements?
I’m definitely an “it just works” guy, and I am by no means an engineer. For me the printing is the hobby, not the printer.
Multimaterial would be good, but only if it doesn’t have to purge between colors. I bought the AMS lite along with the mini, and while it’s convenient when I want to print something in a different color, only having one nozzle means a truly multi-color print takes orders of magnitude longer to finish unless the print itself is completely designed around the limitations of the single-nozzle setup. Having said that, if the MMS can also act as dry storage that would be a plus even if I primarily use one filament per print.
It’s less about specific build volume and more what I can fit into the existing space while providing more build volume than the Mini’s 7x7x7 inches. I’d say the overall footprint of the printer has to be less than 60 cm on a side, since the table my current printer is on is 60 cm deep.
Enclosure is also a must-have.
Sovol sv8? Formbot Marathon?
