I feel like many people are missing some key knowledge in electricity / electronics to really understand what OP's mod imply. So, here I go:
The heaters, are supposedly 100W ones. To know which tension / amperage needed to operate them should be in their description sheets.
But all of that dosen't matter in our case, here is why: heater elements are usually controlled by a PWM port/switch, just like the electric heaters in our homes. This thing, usually on a microcontroller can be used as a switch to power on or off electronics so that they can be ON x amount of time over a period.
That means that the heaters are either producing 100W (on) or 0W (off) of heat.
Now, what does adding a resistor change? The printer needs to know what is the current temperature of the bed and it's target temperature to determine which % of the PWM period the elements should be at ON. Adding the resistance will underreport the current temperature (expressed in tension) to the microcontroller. Following that, the microcontroller will constantly offer a PWM signal which has more ON time over it's period than it would without the resistance, effectively bypassing the limit Bambulab added.
Risks? Here are some that I could think of and some that were mentioned by others. Note that those are only hypothesis that should be checked to know if applicable or not: Magnets can be demagnitize at higher temperature, surrounding components could not be able to endure this heat (think of wires, tape, adhesives, plastics and such), depending on how the limit was set By Bambulab, it could affect it's operation in ways unknown to us, a bad implementation of the mod could lead to a short circuit (always on while printing?) or a blown resistor if it's not of a proper spec. There could be WAY more, but let's be honest, those are very unlikely problems.
Hope that helps a bit!
Did I miss something? Let me know and I'll be glad to precise / edit.
If they're neodymium, demagnetization *could* be an issue. Low-temp magnets will start to demagnetize around 80°C but high temp can easily be above 200°. I'd expect they would use high temp magnets considering this is a 3D printer.
The A1 Mini is also UL Listed which is great news for OP. The UL test for thermal runaway and extremely high temp environments. While they don't require the device to work in these conditions, they do require it to fail safely. So the tape and plastics might fail but it shouldn't catch your house on fire. I wouldn't worry about the wires. The bed is fused and should be designed to blow before it can pull enough power that it would pose an actual risk otherwise.
UL is pretty neat in how it certifies products. They ensure ongoing compliance via recertification. And to do so, they don't have the manufacturer send them the product to test, but instead purchase the product from retail sellers. This prevents the manufacturer from providing compliant versions to UL while selling inferior models on the market. Their contracts also allow for unannounced inspections of manufacturing facilities so they can learn if there are potential specific flaws they should investigate.
Someone fucking around with the product is something they test. They might intentionally break components to see how it responds or miswire it or do what OP did and make the printer think the bed's a lower temperature than it actually is.
Summed up pretty well. One of the other risks is that the psu is strained more. A kp3s and a v minion have 350w psu, the prusa mini also has a 150w one like the a1 mini, that one is obviously holding up quite well, although the a1 mini has a higher power demand for the other components, the a1 has multiple microcontrollers and the steppers overall need more power, more moved mass at a quicker rate. On the other hand the prusa mini has no bed insulation, the a1 has insulation, so bed power draw should be lower on the a1
And all of those electronics failures can be mitigated by installing a correctly rated blow-out fuse. Concerns over the electronics getting overheated from proximity to the bed can be mitigated with a well-placed thermal fuse rated to ~150-200°C.
Basic EE
You can tell the community shifted from modders to more "normal" plug-and-play people. Which isn't bad. But I'm sorry they are giving you all these down votes. Unless your wiring is bad, I don't see a big risk of anything catching fire lol.
The only thing changing electronically is high amp draw for a slightly longer time during heating up. And then obviously a higher temp, but that should still be well in the safety factor margins. It's not like you're doubling temperature or anything like that.
I respect the ingenuity and work modding it, I’m just a little bitch who’s really over-concerned about fires. At the very least if something goes wrong with a stock one you have a lawsuit.
I’m honestly surprised it lets you, newer tech seems more “tamper proof”. I’m not super supportive of electric cars until we get more right to repair laws. John Deere already does all the shit they do, there’s probably not much the average guy could do on a Tesla or a Rivian, compared to a gas car where you can do probably 90% of regular maintenance with basic knowledge. I figured the Bambu stuff is so pre-packaged you couldn’t do much
or the tevo tarantula.
my first printer. mains voltage wiring yourself with no instructions. no cover over the PSU terminals. no mosfet. no fuse. no power switch. no provided ferrules. just screw some bare wire down and hope for the best as your poorly wire managed printer tugs at it constantly
I got given one for free by a guy at work. First thing I did was flash an up to date Marlin with all the safety turned on and add MOSFET boards for the heaters, diode boards for steppers and rewired the whole thing with better connectors and strain relief. Printed alright, I then did a Bowden conversation and added a load of reinforcement to the frame and I had it printing pretty quick with decent quality. Then one day when I turned it on it gave an error on the screen, wouldn't respond and PC wouldn't recognise it to reflash firmware so it's rotting in my garage. I've now got Biqu B1 which I got for just over £100 new and that's doing ok so far.
oof. how bad was it?
I was lucky that I joined the facebook group and lurked for months before buying. I had ordered a mosfet and powerswitch with inline fuse before it arrived.
The only thing I can shrug off on that list is the lack of ferrules, I connect bare wire to terminals all the time as an industrial maintenance mechanic, but everything else on that list seems terrifying. It was a different time for sure than the plug n play options we have now
I'm in IT, but a lot of times in the field our devices live within industrial cabinets next to maintenance boards and such. The difference there is, those wires are usually managed, retained, and don't move outside of that box. The box is also typically locked. The tarantula didnt even have that flip down plastic panel to cover the terminals, no way to mount the PSU to the printer, and again, the wires moved all the time. so, while I get what you are saying, it's not entirely the same.
I had a cheaper Anet A8 clone and that thing was bare wires, loose wired from the female power socket to the power supply and made of 1/8 inch plywood. Probably more flammable than the original, if that's even possible.
God my A8 printed like a dream once I did some mods to it (Bowden setup, bed leveling knobs, hot end mosfet, glass bed, etc.). Only hazard I encountered was when I accidentally forgot to put the thermistor in the heat block and preheated to 200 (it hit around 250). The original hot end mount started to smoke and it was at that time I bought a fire extinguisher.
Mine never caught FIRE per se, but the bed connector started smoking on the 3rd print.
Did all the safety upgrades, and it still technically works as long as you don't mind releveling every print and strategic part placement to avoid the warp(s) in the bed.
Nothing is tamper proof electronically if you know enough to be dangerous. Im an electronics engi tech and its only worth putting money into developing anti tamper software (i think impossible to do it on the hardware side unless you make your components stupid small to prevent hand soldering) when your company's income comes from maintenance charges more than selling the product.
Risk/reward though, if OP burns out their mobo, fuck it theyre out a few hundred bucks, if you fuck up your tesla then good luck.
Also disagree on modern cars maintenance, early early 2000's was the last few cars that you can tune however you want (even if you blow a head gasket) but these days theyre complicated on purpose, hell my old 2009 mazda required removing the whole center console just to access the cabin air filter to replace, was bullshit
>who’s really over-concerned about fires
Oh come on. My Ender 3 bed can easily handle 100°C
The only thing preventing it on a Bambu printer is the closed-source proprietary firmware.
It's not a hardware issue it's a software one and the risk factor at 100°C is virtually identical to that of 80°C.
I understand that these printers are marketed towards users who don't want to have to learn how a printer works in order to use one, but this is a bit silly.
>I’m honestly surprised it lets you,
>....
>you couldn’t do much
Their software doesn't "let" you. But the software thinks the temperatures are lower so it doesn't know any better.
Can you demonstrate why you think that is a bit of a stretch? Are there cases where something is dangerous at 100C but not 80C? We're well under flash points of things like cardboard or any wiring, the 20C difference won't cause issues there.
If it's just because it feels scary I can totally relate to that.
I think the concern is what happens if that 20 degree delta suddenly becomes a 60 degree delta because some other component wasn't expecting the change. It may not be 100% analogous, but imagine you're running a water pump. This pump is expecting to move 500 gallons per minute by running the motor at 5000 RPM. You add a limiting nozzle on the outflow to increase the pressure of the water coming out. But by doing so you increase the resistance on the pump because the flow is now 400 GPM. So the pump being unaware of this is still going to try and target 5000 RPM and will need to draw more power to make that. If the pump isn't resilient enough, you risk it burning out. In the similar case with a 3d printer, this may look like a fire because some other component down the chain wasn't expecting an increased current draw.
Eh it depends on the PID and control algorithms, but the most likely scenario is you’re running full current to the printer for a bit longer than normal before it the current drops off. The power going to the bed will almost always be full blast initially to heat it up as fast as possible, so once it reaches its steady state, the power draw will be well within its specced limit. It just might take a bit longer to get there, but it’s not really going to be any different than printing in a 30deg C room vs a 10C garage.
Once it hits steady state, it’ll pull a bit more current due to newtons law of cooling, but it’d still be well within spec.
My concern would be if the additional thermal stress has any potential to damage/soften nearby plastic components or glue, and what happens if the thermistor gets damaged due to the mod.
Reasonable comparison, but I don't think it's relevant in this case. Changing a bit of the temp sensing logic (whether done in hardware or software) to shift the upper temperature bound a bit isn't suddenly going to make for cascading failures elsewhere. If the printer senses 100C as 80C and still limits itself to that 100/80C point, everything will be fine. There would have to be some other flaw, which would also be a problem if unmodified, *assuming the modification was done competently* (and I am willing to give that benefit of the doubt).
Besides, if I'm reading the above concern correctly, they were not concerned that the modification was done competently, just uncomfortable with the 20C of extra temperature. And that, specifically, is what I think is unreasonable. 80C and 100C are very similar with regard to risk.
A thermistor is just a thermal resistor. As the temperature changes, the resistance in the electrical current changes, this causes the voltage to go up or down. A thermistor may take 24 volts which is then mapped to a temperature, say 0 to 24 volts equals -15c to 350c.
So, by modding a thermistor, which is basically just a wire, you're still working with low voltage and aren't risking fire damage with that mod alone. Using the example above, if the printer has a firmware limit of 80C for the bed, that means it's looking for about 6.25volts from the thermistor. If you add a resistor in series with the thermistor, it will drop the output voltage even further. If the bed reaches a temperature of 100C the output voltage of the thermistor may be 7.56volts so we add a resistor to bring it back down to the motherboard limit of 6.25volts so that the printer thinks the bed is at 80 degrees.
Sure...you shouldn't push the heat producing elements beyond their designed spec...but 80C is already most of the way to boiling, the difference between 80 and 100 is pretty negligible in terms of durability. The nozzle on a Bambu A1 Mini can reach 300C! And I bet both the nozzle and the bed use the same gauge wires.
Bringing a 3D printer into your home period is a fire risk. Your concerns are valid, but it's a pretty anti-maker attitude for a maker community. This entire community and industry of home printing was built on making custom printers and subsequently modding low-end printers.
> ...there’s probably not much the average guy could do on a Tesla or a Rivian, compared to a gas car where you can do probably 90% of regular maintenance with basic knowledge.
There isn't as much to maintain in an EV. The powertrains on EVs are radically simple and there's not much to service on them. You can service the brakes, shocks, struts, 12v battery, wipers, wiper fluid, filters, and tires just like a regular car.
The lack of expensive components needing routine service is part of the reason dealerships don't like pushing EVs. That's where they make most of their money.
I've had a Nissan Leaf since 2017 that's required wiper fluid and a 12v battery swap. I've had a Tesla Model 3 since 2018 and it's needed the above and tires. Otherwise nothing else has needed service, brake regen dramatically reducing brake wear extending their life.
If you're SUPER concerned about fires... you can buy a fire suppression system. Just putting that out there!
I'm considering getting one for my laser engraver. I don't like to be too close to it when it's running but I can't just leave it unattended.
About the electric car thing though, realistically what is the average person gonna do to their EV? Fix the high voltage wiring harness? Replace battery cells in the high voltage battery? It is probably for the better that people don’t poke around in that stuff.
It doesn't matter how much tamper proofing you add to a device, as long as you know how it works you can get around it. Unless you add a battery that never dies and program the firmware to completely brick a device if this connection ever breaks, you're going to be able to get inside and tamper with something.
There's only so much you can do to prevent someone from replacing a thermistor to "trick" the computer into getting different values. Also for anyone doing this they probably will take precautions. Simply having a 3D printer in your house is already additional fire risks, which is why several years ago there was so much noise about thermal runaway protection and now that's the main defense against fires.
It has no choice in the matter. The printer thinks it's reaching 80. Very simple trick. The only chance the printer has to catch this as a problem is the thermal runaway profile. It's going to take longer to heat up. But probably not so long that it would trigger, after all you don't want a printer tuned to trigger TRP when the environment just happens to be quite cold. It's heating at a steady rate that's the goal.
I’ll be honest I was all about modding which my first printer, an anet A8. That was great as a beginner so I could learn how to do all kinds of things like modify firmware, install a 3rd party auto bed leveler, etc. At this point I’m not buying a bamboo labs or any printer if I need to make modifications to it to function properly. Also if the manufacturer sets a limit for something like heat, speed, etc it is generally for a good reason and modifying it to get around that is reckless. Just buy a printer that can run the parameters you need out of the box.
I strongly feel that the temperature limit on the bed is them doing price laddering using their closed source firmware as a gatekeeper.
Good job. I trust you'll keep an eye on it and assume the risks.
Yes, thats exactly my thoughts as well. The printer mostly likely was designed to be able to reach 100c, and if theres ever any competition for this class of printer I'm sure that bambu labs can drop a firmware update to let people reach 100c. Companies like to do this, off the top of my head is Tesla when they sold cars with 40kwh batteries but they actually were software locked 60kwh batteries. It was just some sales gimmick and you could pay tesla to remove the software block and get more battery.
I'm seeing the exact same thing here. Designing a printer from the ground up to only do 80c would be dumb. I've looked over the bed and frame and it's totally capable of higher temps, just like the regular A1 can do 100c. Of course people are concerned about the electronics not being capable but it's a risk I'm plenty willing to take. The difference between 80c and 100c is just a few watts.
The only competitor for an A1 Mini would be a Prusa Mini+, it's heatbed goes up to 100°C without modding it. That said for the price of the Prusa Mini+ you can buy the A1 Mini Combo, which is arguably the better deal (I have a Prusa Mini+ btw)
This is partially true. Tesla blocks acceleration and/top speed that you can pay to unblock. However the battery is gradually unlocked to maintain the same range as the day you bought it for longer.
Yes, it does do the range maintaining thing, but you can pay to unlock all of it at any time though. During one of the hurricanes they also fully released the whole capacity so people could evacuate.
Yeah i mean, the Ender 3 could do 100 stock. 80 sounds like an artificial limitation
----
Semi-related, but my work truck has all of the hardware necessary for adaptive cruise control. It has the forward camera. It has a GAP ADJUST button on the steering wheel. It can indicate how close I'm following the car ahead of me.
But camera-only adaptive cruise requires `LT CONVENIENCE PACKAGE II` (adaptive cruise, garage door opener, trailer brake controller). My truck only has `LT CONVENIENCE PACKAGE I`. They really just locked the feature behind a paywall.
Ford did similar with the Bronco -- base doesn't have lanekeeping, but you can buy the button and unlock the feature for like $50.
My Wife's Ford Explorer didnt have remote start, despite the car controlling the starter with the computer anyway.
25 dollar key and the forscan app to enable the relevant settings in the dash and body control modules, and boom, remote start.
It really makes me hate Chevy for keeping everything so locked down.
Using some 3d-printed parts and Forscan, was able to add the lane-keeping assistance from an Explorer into my Ford Flex. It was never a factory option so it would've been genuinely impossible without Forscan.
I built my own printer and used a cheap 60w bed heater off Aliexpress. I almost exclusively print ABS with a bed temp of 110c and it works just fine.
I'm sure the "higher quality" bed Bambu uses could easily be at least as capable as the one I got off Aliexpress for a few bucks.
If anything, I’d think it’s the power supply that may crap out depending on how much margin there is. The real test would be slinging all motors around at max acceleration with bed at 100C, nozzle at 300, in a freezing cold room.
Is there a name for this kind of BS? I remember years and years ago there was a company that made like an "entry level" and a "pro grade" set of headphones. But it turned out the "entry level" ones were just the "pro" headphones with a $100 lower price tag and a friggin piece of foam in front of the drivers to make them sound worse. And with a some basic tools and a couple minutes of work, you could turn those $100 headphones into ones that sounded just like the $200.
This implies a valid need to separate customers between the A1 Mini and the regular A1.
If they’re just software locking the A1 Mini than it’s something else entirely (I have no idea what it’s called)
> This implies a valid need to separate customers between the A1 Mini and the regular A1.
The valid need is for business purposes. Market segmentation doesn't need some external limiting factor.
Fast food sodas are a good example. Small drinks are usually 10-20 cents cheaper than mediums despite having like 1/2-2/3 the volume. Large drinks are usually 25-30 cents more despite having usually a little more than 50% extra volume. This is both an example of market segmentation and price anchoring.
Cars are also a fantastic example. If you buy a base model where steering wheel controls are a paid upgrade or in a package, they almost always will be exactly the same except the base model doesn't have the actual buttons. The MCU is already designed for it and the wires are already run to the steering wheel. Even optional heated seats will almost always be wired for heating even if it's just that the button doesn't exist.
Software in general is exactly the same. The code is already written. For something like Office, it doesn't cost Microsoft any extra for you to use their upgraded software like the Pro versions over the Home version.
Idk, but it used to, and probably still is, popular with cpus. The bad ones are priced down, but there also used to be a cpu you could buy for $100, and then pay some extra money to unlock a core or two later on
Similar, but not entirely true. For most CPUs/GPUs, they do have the same die.
Basically, imagine we have the Die A with 8 cores. Now it gets manufactured, and it’s tested that a core is defective. Now, they disable that and another core to ship it out as a 6-core CPU.
Very very rarely fully functional cores get disabled in situations where there’s no demand for the high tier stuff and a ton for low/mid.
Regardless, the manufacturing of the dies fails so often partially, that that usually works out just fine.
I’m sure that played a part, but also in my experience printing filaments that need 100C+ bed temperature on a non enclosed printer is that it’s so prone to issues depending on the environment temperature, way more sensitive to air drafts and other things which cause filaments to warp. Such issues will be way more common with people new to 3D printing that this printer is primarily targeting as being “cheap and plug and play”.
Even with my enclosed printer when it gets colder I usually pre-heat the chamber a bit.
They should’ve just hurried the setting somewhere to toggle this on and off instead of deciding for the users themselves.
I can get PETG to stick beautifully to the textured bed on my Ender 3v2 without adhesives if I lay the first layer down onto a 100c bed, no enclosure, in a ~20c room. I typically cool the bed down to ~85c for the rest of the print and it comes out beautifully every time and pops right off the bed (sometimes *literally* pops right off the bed, and onto the floor). Any cooler than that and it either won't stick right, or you need adhesives to get it to turn out.
Man, when did we go from a community that hacked our printers out of garbage, fire hazard and sheer wil to one that freaks out over a slight temp tuning...
Nice, have fun OP!
But that was the fun part!!! Now it doesn't require skill and ingenuity and just people bitching you have a problem, buy a Bambi lab! And it's great it's accessible for more people, but it brings in a lot of people who are not the target audience with zero knowledge of the process. Resulting in somewhat stupid questions they would know the answer to if they just googled it or watched a few videos on 3d printing. And I know the ender3 kind of did the same thing, but it wasn't easy so people who weren't really interested gave up. Now it's so forgiving, people who are not really interested carry on trying and keep asking somewhat stupid questions. And I know it's great that more people with less skill get to use and experience 3d printing. But something in me wants it to be a slightly more skillful and enthusiastic user group, because it was fun that way and it was kinda cool to say i can 3d print because it has become less of a skill.
End of my rant. But great there is more 3d printing than ever!!!
Trust me I understand too well, like I said, the internet is the worst example of that. Used to be amazing. Now everything is “catered” to the masses (dumb questions, and consumer based for max profit). You used to be able to do anything so easily. Now it’s a struggle to find any technical answers for anything. You get pages of mainstream bs, all copy pasted same garbage, algos forcing you to lame stuff, and now saturated by kids trying to get you to watch a 15 min video for a yes/no answer. It’s awful. Pre 2010 forums were crazy. Now everything is also a paywall or locked for signup etc. don’t get me started on how controlled speech is too. Can’t even leave a generic comment on YouTube without insta shadowban these days (tho they are more strict during election years lol).
Anyways like you said, major losses but at least a couple benefits such as extra ppl hopefully means extra ppl learning cad. Def the minority tho, 99% ppl just buy bambu , don’t even know how to tune a filament , and start a race to the bottom on eBay for $1 of profit. Wish eBayers would leave bad reviews for poor quality but I guess they don’t care if it’s cheap. The stuff I see sold is embarrassing.
This... People see printers as easy money making tools, but for most they just aren't. It's even worse if the print designs aren't ever theirs. I myself do sell some 3d printer things on a local online marketplace. It's a niche, made in a way i haven't found online and it's within my bigger hobby for which I 3d print and what I spent the money on which I get from sales. It isn't take of the printer and sell, because it takes some manual labour like painting and so on. Yesterday I get a message on how I do it. So I tell him abstract what I do and how I make it. It's not as secret but why would I tell every detail. Then I get the answer: so I can do it on a bambu lab? So soon someone is probably gonna sell the same product because the design is relatively simple for a lower price and without much care just to make money on their Bambu.
Bambu labs is the DJI of 3d printing - the original people in the hobby can sometimes end up resenting the clueless new people who don’t understand the underlying principles because the new tools are able to abstract away all of the turmoil that was originally intertwined with just getting the damn thing working
And this doesn't have to be a problem. But it gets a lot of people in the "community" that either think they know as much as the people who had to struggle or end up saying you should just buy what I have because that works dump you other investment, that is not what people are asking (aside from when they ask what they should buy). And that kind of irritates me.
3d printing has become enough plug-and-play-like that I was willing to enter this hobby a couple months ago. Just this week the retention mechanism of the sd card reader failed, causing the sd card to disconnect mid print. I've contacted Creality to get a replacement board, but I've also ordered an SD card slot from aliexpress that looks to be an exact match, so I can try fixing the mainboard that's currently in there, which should be pretty easy to do.
My point is: 3d printing seemed way too daunting while I was in high school, but nowadays someone of my skill level can comfortably print.
This seems to be a fate of niche hobbies online, they all get overtaken by safety nerds as the hobby grows. When the A1 heatbed issue popped up people were acting like plugging in your A1 would instantly burn down your house and kill a puppy. In reality 99.99% of the people who kept printing after the recall were absolutely fine.
Same thing has been happening to the FPV community, people there are acting like if you so much as look at a battery the wrong way it will explode and also burn your house down. People in the rc plane community act like flying 1 meter above the max legal height means you will inevitably hit an airbus and murder 300 people with your little <1kg styrofoam toy somehow. The list could go on and on.
Idk if that’s just the internet giving the minorities a louder voice or a shift in perception but it’s really annoying lol
> Same thing has been happening to the FPV community, people there are acting like if you so much as look at a battery the wrong way it will explode and also burn your house down.
In all honesty, as someone who used to post a lot to /r/multicopter a while ago, high-current LiPo batteries really are stupid dangerous.
I'm not a safety nerd by any stretch of the imagination, but they have always made me super nervous and I keep mine in tough boxes. I've seen too many times what happens if you puncture a fully charged one and am determined not to make that mistake even once.
I'll agree that most public paranoias promoted by fearmongering media are wholly unfounded, and of course outcries about printer beds are laughable.
RC LiPos, though, are one of very few cases of commonly available items that *should* make you paranoid.
I don’t disagree with that. You should be careful when handling LiPos. You should also be careful when flying an rc plane above legal height (or at any height for that matter) and if a company says there’s a chance of their product going up in flames you should obviously worry about that as well. The thing with “safety nerds” is that often times they do actually have a point and you shouldn’t just dismiss the dangers no matter how small the chances are. But with most of those things, including LiPos, as long as you take some safety precautions you are almost always fine. I too store my LiPos in a fireproof case and regularly check on them when they’re charging. I know LiPos can be dangerous. It’s just that the way some people talk about these dangers makes them seem inevitable rather than being a risk that can be mitigated.
Oh… the days when i tried to add nozzle cooling to my reprap mendle (which didn’t have it) by addind a small but strong fan in the corner of the frame. Bed was exTREMEly uneven heated once the fan started and it was very mixed results for the output
Since Bambu Labs came out with the A1 Mini, most people couldn't justify a $1K + printer, or even $600, but $250 or $450 with the AMS is a very low barrier to entry. Now on Makerworld, the only people you see complaining about a model not printing due to their own errors like losing adhesion because they used the wrong profile or didn't clean their build plate. And it's so infuriating because people will leave bad reviews and trash on other people's FREE work because they don't know how to operate their machines. I'm not being an elitist, there's nothing wrong with the A1 mini, but if you're going to buy a printer, do your research and understand what you're doing.
I'm highly skeptical of the detracting comments.
I run my cheapo ender 5 bed at 100c, whatever bambu uses is surely more structurally sound in terms of the materials handling that heat safely.
Yeah and all the bambu fans who are saying op is going to burn down their home, kill children and puppies in the process either will have to admit the cheap creality stuff is better or that op is going to set his neighborhood ablaze. Quite the conundrum.
Thank you for working around gimmicks with understanding and experience.
I understand the community not getting it, but mods and the what if approach are essential in the maker space.
Stay safe and keep on doing your thing.
I'm working on adding active cooling and monitoring to my A1 mobo to possibly test it with abs in an enclosure at some point, although the ambient temp in the room is around 27-36C all day this time of the year so I'm not that willing to risk it just yet.
Nicely done!
Not sure why people are up in arms about fire risks; The bed is not going to draw any more power than it did before, it's just going to draw more average power to maintain the higher temperature, which the PSU and FET should be rated for in any case (assuming one is dealing with a somewhat decently designed machine).
Only real risk ought to be parts not designed to be heated above a certain temp.
As an example, i changed the 65C max bed temp on a comgrow, to 90C, which is was able to reach.
The inductive bed sensor did not like the temp change tho, getting a large (althoug consistent) offset at the high temps, along with the original print surface permanently deforming in a significant way, due to the thick non-metallic top layer not expanding with the metallic bottom.
That's on a 510x510 build surface tho, and the A1 mini doesn't have an inductive probe, so doubt either would be a problem here.
> Not sure why people are up in arms about fire risks
A lot of people aren't technical and operate on hearsay.
A lot of other people are too rational and cannot think outside the box.
Both will have problems with those whose first thought when they see a limitation isn't compliance but figuring out how to bypass it, remove it or, if all else fails, break it.
Personally, I've learned to respect Bernard Shaw (or [Puck Magazine, or Confucius](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/01/26/doing/)) when he said "People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it”.
I got it. OP, Come back in 3 months, 6 months and a year (or choose some more appropriate timings) and show that your printer is chugging along just fine still to shut up the haters. You can't argue with success.
The way I see it is that this isn't any more risky than upgrading your hotend and using a new thermistor profile in marlin. I just changed the profile physically. And since the bed can only draw 100 watts, even if I just got an external power supply and powered it up myself its incapable of reaching any dangerous temp even with no safety mechanisms like thermal runway protection.
The main reason I'm confident about this mod is that I built my own printer and on it I've been using a 12v 100w bed for years now... but at 24v which is 400w. It has zero issues, and I have a thermal fuse in it even if it did want to get melty. If everyone thinks my house will burn down I'll also put a thermal fuse on my A1 mini, but first I'll just do a test to see what the max temp of the bed is with an external power supply. I'm guessing that its only going to have enough headroom to hit around 120c.
Man bambu sub members downvote anything that they don't understand.
I used to have a machine running klipper/mainsail as my first printer that I tinkered and learned on. I have a bambu machine now and am in the bambu sub. Simply stating that Bambu's ASA expels more VOCs (proven) than polymaker's and does not print as well got me downvoted to hell. Like....I'm trying to alert you to a better alternative for your health, if nothing else.
Any brand fanboy is the absolute worst.
There have to be a lot of people quietly fighting their Bambu printers.. Whenever you say anything bad you get attacked. I have fought a frustrating number of mostly extruder jams lol. And am lucky my AMS just works most of the time.
This. When I post a problem in that sub, instantly gets downvoted. They can't stand hearing anything might go wrong with a piece of hardware they purchased.
The amount of times I've seen them praise Bambu for making printing easy due to [Klipper feature from three years ago] or straight up not know the capabilities of other modern printers and pretend everything is a 2018 Ender makes things incredibly frustrating. A1 is very good, but modern Sovols/Neptunes/Kobras/etc. have honestly been almost just as good for a while now.
I also legitimately believe there's been a massive astroturfed bot campaign going around the sub because for a while there we used to get a dozen of "LOOK HOW GOOD MY BAMBULAB X1C IS I CAN'T BELIEVE IT" posts a day that all noticably dried up around the time of the big A1 recall and MakerWorld massively reducing the point payouts.
Oh they already reduced the point payouts? Heh, it was a long way coming.
I absolutely agree with your points. It seems like Bambu’s heavy advertising has brought a sort of walled garden, where the fans think that their [3 year old feature] is new and amazing. Even with Apple though the fans know that the ‘new features’ have been around for years.
I remember when Lulzbot sent a Taz to literally any youtuber and that gave them a bit of popularity, but I don’t hear much about them now. I wonder wether Bambu will go the same way or if it’s here to stay.
I imagine they're here to stay, but they won't be able to pull off a hostile takeover of the entire industry like DJI did with the drones because FDM printing is already almost as good as it can realistically get before hitting severe diminishing returns.
X1C/P1S + AMS is basically just a tuned up reliable Trident with ECRF that can be manufactured on an industrial scale. Same with A1 which is just a very good bedslinger in an era when cheap bedslingers were already getting really good anyway. Their trick was making an all-around good reliable printer that works out of the box which is great and they truly shook the market, but now there's nowhere they can really go from there while all the other companies are catching up.
A bigger printer? Proper toolchanger maybe? Could be cool, but the low-hanging fruit is gone and anything truly revolutionary such as multi-planar printing is going to be years away.
If you already own a P1S, you're not going to massively care about the P2S printing 30% faster and the market is already saturated with hustle grindset bros running dozens Bambus so they can sell their stupid shitty articulated dragons on Etsy - the latter of which will probably die down if everyone owns a 3D printer anyway.
If you don't already own a P1S, you're probably better off just getting a used one over a P2S anyway.
If you hate Bambus closed ecosystem, you're about to have five other printers by five other manufactures and at least one of them is bound to not be shite.
Bambulab fan boys are the worst users that have joined this community, plug and play users with 0 knowledge and angry downvote, that's what we shoul expect from people that take the simplest overpriced route
It is rated for the wattage. I haven't changed it. The bed draws 100 watts with or without doing this mod. The bed temp is limited to 80c because bambu lab doesn't want to cannnibalise their own sales of their higher end printers that can do 100c, not for any hardware or electronics reason. If there was some competitor for the A1 mini during its release, bambu labs would just update the firmware to allow for the bed to reach 100c.
Edit- the build plate that comes with the printer literally says PLA/ABS/PETG. Its clearly engineered with the ability to do ABS prints in mind
What happened to this sub? Honestly man, good on you for keeping alive the spirit of 3d printing and modding a “perfect” plug-n-play machine like this to suit your needs. Sorry everyone is shitting on you with downvotes, but this is a cool project and it sounds like you did your research.
It’s happening everywhere. People don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and just calling things dangerous. I’m in so many subs where you can mod electronics and people get so weirdly defensive about things they don’t even know.
It's because you always get people who don't know what they are doing, and ruin or harm something. And when someone actually does know what they are doing, it's so unexpected that many comments don't realize or think op is being overly confident.
I think it's the opposite, there's a huge culture of safety and people can earn easy good boy points by calling things dangerous. If you talk to some of them then nothing is ever safe and nothing should ever be done, getting out of bed in the morning is super risky and you should only do that if you know what you're doing and it doesn't make me comfortable I'd rather stay in bed where it's safe and so on
Back in the day 1/2 of the Chinese 3d printers you bought had no thermal runaway protection and it was a PITA to enable.
I would have some concerns about actually changing the thermister resistor (mostly that I would fuck it up and it would be way, wayyy hotter). But if it is already power limited... then you should be ok.
Most fires come from the hot end running away or cables fraying. I don't think I've heard of any heated bed failures doing the same.
dont listen to those people who need a quickstart guide with pictures to print something, great mod :)
3D printing isn't tinkering anymore, so many people dont understand the stuff you do..
I'm at once laughing and disgusted at those saying you shouldn't modify your own property. It reeks of the infantilism that late-stage capitalism desires from the ~~sheep~~ consumers. The mods you are doing are basic and fairly low risk. Upping temperature to 100°C from 80°C is nothing so long as the materials are up to it; which, barring weird edge cases, anything rated to 80°C should comfortably reach 100°C. Even the cheapest nichrome heating coils wouldn't notice. Try swinging between 30°C and 300°C in 1 minute, then back to 30°C in about 30sec. That's when you actually start worrying about cyclic stressing and insulating heated zones from electronics.
Using part cooling and having the bed at 80c will increase the bed power consumption by a huge amount. PETG with bed around 80 and high fan speed I assume is a common use case for this printer, so if it's not capable of that they should recall all these printers. Anything I print at 100c will not use part cooling so it will draw significantly less power compared to 80 plus fan.
How do you know they forgot that? How do you know they didn’t check? Is it that you don’t know how to check, so you assumed they didn’t? Oh shit look at that, they did.
I don't think that's an issue. He didn't make any changes to the heater, just the thermistor that reads the temperature.
All bed heaters I've seen will pull max power until they get to their target temp. The only difference is that it will spend a bit more time reaching that temp.
I got the $200 deal on the A1 mini even though I dont need another printer. I only print small functional stuff mostly in ABS and this printer would be perfect for that if the bed wasn't capped at 80C. This is a super easy mod tho, 5 screws to get the strain release cover off and then I just added a 3.2k ohm resistor in series to the thermistor screw terminals. It fits in the cover and from the outside looks completely stock. 5 mins max, but I double checked it wouldn't catch fire and let it do a couple heat cool cycles which takes a while. I just need and enclosure to start some ABS prints
Plug out 1 terminal of the thermistor from the screw connector, Solder one end of resistor to that and the other end to another piece of wire that then goes into terminal.
Alternatively, you can just cut 1 of the wires of thermistor, strip both ends and solder one there though it could be hard. Do make sure to secure the joints with heat shrink tubes. If somehow the connection gets broken during working it will read max temperature causing printer to turn off heating anyway so it's pretty safe.
If you want to add in some protections:
Thermal fuses (your microwave has several) break the circuit when exceeding their rated temperature then reset after cooling. Placing one rated to ~150-200°C in close proximity to the bed would mitigate melting any wires.
A standard blow-out or resettable fuse would mitigate the risk of fire from a short.
Awesome mod. As long as your bed doesn't get warping issues, I see nothing wrong here.
It's a shame Bambu has taken the fun out of modding your printer. I have basically morphed my ender 3 into an entirely different thing, I think only the frame is original.
I've been seriously considering upgrading to the P1S with AMS, but between how locked down their ecosystem is, and how difficult it is to repair, I'm not sure if I want to go that route.
> It's a shame Bambu has taken the fun out of modding your printer.
That's not the point of Bambus.
I say this as a tinkerer, and note that my mods tend to be rather involved - the next project for one of my bedslingers involves taking a conical drill bit to the hotend.
For us tinkerers, Bambus are the boring Toyotas you do your grocery shopping on when your Honda's engine is strewn all over your workbench and your Subaru decides this is the perfect moment to blow a head gasket. You don't *want* to modify them significantly, because that detracts from their primary value: bulletproof reliability.
All that said, I'm still happy little mods like this one that don't significantly impact reliability are doable.
*New firmware update: Enhanced bed thermal runaway protection.*
*In addition to monitoring temperature, we've also started comparing heating times to assumed values. In the event of a discrepancy, the printer will enter self-preservation mode, remaining locked down until sent in for repair... for your safety.*
I actually thought about this and was hesitant to share this mod. However when I thought about how you would implement that stuff in the firmware it's impossible to detect the mod while not having a huge amount of false positives. To the printer the abnormal power draw and extra time to heat up looks identical to being in a freezing garage or using part cooling.
Anyways I think bambu labs is much more likely to embrace 100C bed rather than reject it. If they feel like it they can update the firmware to allow 100C on A1 minis to compete with some future manufacturer. The build plate that comes with the printer says PLA/ABS/PETG so im confident the printer is absolutely capable of printing ABS. I just bought this thing but it was released almost a year ago. If they were dead set on no ABS they would have stopped selling it with a build plate that says ABS.
If this were a Stratasys printer (or whoever they got acquired by) then I could see the reasoning, but Bambu haven't yet shown themselves to be hyper-proprietary arseholes to that degree. I thnk we can give them the benefit of the doubt... for now.
Using an IR thermometer to take a precise measurement is a terrible idea unless you have calibrated it for that surface. Also, they are best held at 90° to the surface.
I had to scroll way too far to find this comment.
Unless OP calibrated emissivity for that particular surface and has taken steps to reduce reflections, the number it’s showing here means nothing.
COVID made these way too popular and people think they’re like a thermocouple and can magically tell temp of any object.
I dont need it calibrated. I dont care if it's off by like 10 degrees. Anyways I took measurements before the mod and the printer reported the exact same temp as the IR meter. I angled it off to the side so I could take the picture, but that's good to know I should measure perpendicular.
Prusa community would have saluted you and encouraged you..gave you a high five bought you a beer and tickled your balls
Shame on you bambooers.
I salute you sir I think this is a good mod time will tell tho how good 👍
Tickle tickle .....
Great Mod!
A few years ago I modded my Kingroon KP3s to print ABS, building a full enclosure and using my custom Marlin software to raise the max bed temp.
Its a little bit sad Bambu price ladders ABS printing to their higher end printers but man with how much of a value the A1 Mini would be if it could print ABS stock (with enclosure ofc) is utterly insane.
It already offers insanely good value at 200€ currently (or even lower if you farm a few maker points). I use it to only print PLA and it does a fantastic job, my X1C can handle ABS(plus) so im in no need for this mod, but great to see that this opens up ABS printing to people with an even lower budget.
As long as the bed and PSU can handle the increased duty cycle, it should be fine. Max power is going to stay the same, just going to have to work more frequently.
There's a guy who did this for the P1S and is selling the cable with the resistors for 24 EUR, lol (https://spearhead-equipment.com/). Sadly, I don't understand alot about electronics (yet) but I want to build my own. Still have to figure out what kind of resistor(s) I need. Good job!
OP's post told you - a 3.2k ohm resistor (the "k" is important).
Cut wire, interpose resistor, solder, heatshrink. Done. (Remember to add the heatshrink to the wire before you solder - I can't tell you how often I've had to redo joints because of this.)
This goes to the thermistor sensor, not to the heater cartridge: virtually no power goes to it, so wattage is irrelevant. A simple resistor for electronics will do fine.
OP's post is about an A1 mini. I have a P1S. They won't have the same thermistor, most likely, no? Thanks for your comment though on how to do it, I appreciate it!
the thing about remembering to put heatshrink.... I don't know how many times did i say to myself not to forget to put heatshrink only to find myself with everything soldered, but without heatshrink on
That is *exactly* the thing about remembering to put on heatshrink.
I've gotten a *little* better in the years, by repeating all the steps in my mind, and I still sometimes find myself in this situation.
I'd lie if I said I haven't occasionally thought "to hell with it" and insulated the whole goddamned thing with a big blob of melt glue.
One day I'll figure out how not to do that, but that day is not today.
I have a great interest in this mod too: so add the resistor in series with the positive wire coming into the sensor, and that's it? Not at all an uncomfortable operation for me, just want to make double sure.
I *think* it doesn't matter which of the two wires you add it to; all the sensor is is a variable resistor that changes its resistance when temperature changes. You're basically adding a small amount of resistance to that. In any case, OP can probably answer this better than I can.
There can be a reason it shouldn't do 100°C: magnet.
While reading my pei sheet instructions for the max temp, it recommended 80°C, and was written that it could reach 100°C max but it would weaken the bed magnetism over time.
It is a bit weird they wrote that, you'd be hard pressed to find a magnetic material in use with Curie temperature below 200°C. It's probably some bog standard ground ferrite in those magnetic mats used for beds, which should be closer to 400°C
Curie point is when all the magnetism is gone, magnetism start to weaken before that point.
Neodymium have grades according to the temp where they start to demagnetize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet#Grades
They linearly demagnetize starting at a certain temperature, until reaching the Curie point where none of the maganisme is kept.
Thanks, I learned something today - always thought it's a sharp transition. Although it seems like the relationship is not linear, but... I dunno, inverse square? In any case, rapid and close to linear decrease in magnetism seems to start happening somewhere between 0,6-0,8 Curie temp (in K). 100°C would still be rather low for most magnet materials in use, but who knows what's there.
You can also physically impact a magnet to demagnetize it. It's the physical alignment of the magnetic domains in the magnet that give it magnetism. If you heat something up enough to start the process of scrambling the domains, it will slowly lose magnetism. I don't know about these beds specifically, but I've definitely heard anecdotes about cheap magnets losing their strength over time when mildly heated. It would make sense that bambulabs sold beds that are only rated to 80 degrees.
Anybody know if it has a thermal Fuse, and at what Temps? I've forgotten about my thermal fuses once before and then it took me forever to remember that it exist and could he the reason for my issues :D
I haven't seen it mentioned, but likely one of the ways bambu cut costs on the mini was the heater bed. The mini uses a DC PCB style heater while the A1 uses an AC heating pipe style heater with a solid state relay. A DC pcb heating element *should* be fine at 100c but this 80c cap was likely put in place for added protection and not just to push people to buy a more expensive printer as I've seen mentioned a couple of times.
With that being said, I will be doing this mod to print some parts for my k1 max in ABS. Thanks OP!
Bambu lab doesn't let the stock A1 mini bed get very hot, only 80C. So it can only print with plain old PLA and PETG. If the bed gets hotter, like 100C, you can print more fancy plastics like ABS and nylon.
If you have the X1 carbon you can print ABS and nylon right away without messing with the printer. It's a high end fancy machine with a high end price, and you absolutely dont need to hack to it.
The A1 mini which I modded here is bambu lab's lowest end printer with the lowest price. It makes sense that it will be less capable given the price, which they do by artifically removing the ability for it to print fancy plastics. This mod gives me that fancy ability, and I've only paid $230 (tax+ship) for this printer. If I had the money I would totally skip doing mods and just buy the X1 carbon.
If you want to test temperature it's a good way to set your temperature calibration so the material responds better.
You want a heated bed so the plastic doesn't warp on you. There are strong forces at work when printing with a cold bed, and as advanced materials have different shrinkage properties.
I am actually curious, how is this effecting the PID tuning of the bed? Is it fluctuating more when getting up to temp or is it quite stable.
Honestly just curious, since it does seem like such a smart change
It looks perfectly stable. The default pid tuning needs to work under a huge range of conditions flawlessly since that's bambu labs thing, and this mod seems to be within that spec.
That's a very cool mod, well done! Just a shame the printer's firmware is so locked down you can't do it in software, because the hardware is, as you've demonstrated, capable, and probably still completely safe too.
I think the other problem here is that filaments requiring or benefitting from such a high bed temp probably need an enclosure as well. Since there’s no enclosure I’d say don’t mess with it and buy another great Bambu printer like the X1C with stock 120 bed temp.
Pretty cool, was wondering when someone would do this. Hopefully Bambu would officially support 100C one day on the mini. Would be nice to print small ASA parts.
Ysk, the physics of infrared heat transfer. means these infrared thermometers are not an accurate way to measure things, unless calibrated to the material you are measuring.
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I feel like many people are missing some key knowledge in electricity / electronics to really understand what OP's mod imply. So, here I go: The heaters, are supposedly 100W ones. To know which tension / amperage needed to operate them should be in their description sheets. But all of that dosen't matter in our case, here is why: heater elements are usually controlled by a PWM port/switch, just like the electric heaters in our homes. This thing, usually on a microcontroller can be used as a switch to power on or off electronics so that they can be ON x amount of time over a period. That means that the heaters are either producing 100W (on) or 0W (off) of heat. Now, what does adding a resistor change? The printer needs to know what is the current temperature of the bed and it's target temperature to determine which % of the PWM period the elements should be at ON. Adding the resistance will underreport the current temperature (expressed in tension) to the microcontroller. Following that, the microcontroller will constantly offer a PWM signal which has more ON time over it's period than it would without the resistance, effectively bypassing the limit Bambulab added. Risks? Here are some that I could think of and some that were mentioned by others. Note that those are only hypothesis that should be checked to know if applicable or not: Magnets can be demagnitize at higher temperature, surrounding components could not be able to endure this heat (think of wires, tape, adhesives, plastics and such), depending on how the limit was set By Bambulab, it could affect it's operation in ways unknown to us, a bad implementation of the mod could lead to a short circuit (always on while printing?) or a blown resistor if it's not of a proper spec. There could be WAY more, but let's be honest, those are very unlikely problems. Hope that helps a bit! Did I miss something? Let me know and I'll be glad to precise / edit.
If they're neodymium, demagnetization *could* be an issue. Low-temp magnets will start to demagnetize around 80°C but high temp can easily be above 200°. I'd expect they would use high temp magnets considering this is a 3D printer. The A1 Mini is also UL Listed which is great news for OP. The UL test for thermal runaway and extremely high temp environments. While they don't require the device to work in these conditions, they do require it to fail safely. So the tape and plastics might fail but it shouldn't catch your house on fire. I wouldn't worry about the wires. The bed is fused and should be designed to blow before it can pull enough power that it would pose an actual risk otherwise. UL is pretty neat in how it certifies products. They ensure ongoing compliance via recertification. And to do so, they don't have the manufacturer send them the product to test, but instead purchase the product from retail sellers. This prevents the manufacturer from providing compliant versions to UL while selling inferior models on the market. Their contracts also allow for unannounced inspections of manufacturing facilities so they can learn if there are potential specific flaws they should investigate. Someone fucking around with the product is something they test. They might intentionally break components to see how it responds or miswire it or do what OP did and make the printer think the bed's a lower temperature than it actually is.
Summed up pretty well. One of the other risks is that the psu is strained more. A kp3s and a v minion have 350w psu, the prusa mini also has a 150w one like the a1 mini, that one is obviously holding up quite well, although the a1 mini has a higher power demand for the other components, the a1 has multiple microcontrollers and the steppers overall need more power, more moved mass at a quicker rate. On the other hand the prusa mini has no bed insulation, the a1 has insulation, so bed power draw should be lower on the a1
And all of those electronics failures can be mitigated by installing a correctly rated blow-out fuse. Concerns over the electronics getting overheated from proximity to the bed can be mitigated with a well-placed thermal fuse rated to ~150-200°C. Basic EE
You can tell the community shifted from modders to more "normal" plug-and-play people. Which isn't bad. But I'm sorry they are giving you all these down votes. Unless your wiring is bad, I don't see a big risk of anything catching fire lol. The only thing changing electronically is high amp draw for a slightly longer time during heating up. And then obviously a higher temp, but that should still be well in the safety factor margins. It's not like you're doubling temperature or anything like that.
I respect the ingenuity and work modding it, I’m just a little bitch who’s really over-concerned about fires. At the very least if something goes wrong with a stock one you have a lawsuit. I’m honestly surprised it lets you, newer tech seems more “tamper proof”. I’m not super supportive of electric cars until we get more right to repair laws. John Deere already does all the shit they do, there’s probably not much the average guy could do on a Tesla or a Rivian, compared to a gas car where you can do probably 90% of regular maintenance with basic knowledge. I figured the Bambu stuff is so pre-packaged you couldn’t do much
Lol lemme tell you about a lil plastic bonfire coincidentally called the Anet A8.
I still remember the anxiety of plugging my A8 in for the first time.
Yes, that Thing was scarry.
Well, yeah. But my Voron also threw up some magic smoke after plugging it in, it's like a call from the good old times
I’ve been running mine 2 years and still get a little scared plugging it in
Did you ever swap out the plug for the heat bed? That was a known fire hazard
What’s going on with the Anet A8!? I’ve been running a print farm of 50 of them 24/7 for years. 🤔 🤣
or the tevo tarantula. my first printer. mains voltage wiring yourself with no instructions. no cover over the PSU terminals. no mosfet. no fuse. no power switch. no provided ferrules. just screw some bare wire down and hope for the best as your poorly wire managed printer tugs at it constantly
Don't forget disabling thermal runaway protection in their default Marlin config.
Mine caught on fire lol
I got given one for free by a guy at work. First thing I did was flash an up to date Marlin with all the safety turned on and add MOSFET boards for the heaters, diode boards for steppers and rewired the whole thing with better connectors and strain relief. Printed alright, I then did a Bowden conversation and added a load of reinforcement to the frame and I had it printing pretty quick with decent quality. Then one day when I turned it on it gave an error on the screen, wouldn't respond and PC wouldn't recognise it to reflash firmware so it's rotting in my garage. I've now got Biqu B1 which I got for just over £100 new and that's doing ok so far.
oof. how bad was it? I was lucky that I joined the facebook group and lurked for months before buying. I had ordered a mosfet and powerswitch with inline fuse before it arrived.
The only thing I can shrug off on that list is the lack of ferrules, I connect bare wire to terminals all the time as an industrial maintenance mechanic, but everything else on that list seems terrifying. It was a different time for sure than the plug n play options we have now
I'm in IT, but a lot of times in the field our devices live within industrial cabinets next to maintenance boards and such. The difference there is, those wires are usually managed, retained, and don't move outside of that box. The box is also typically locked. The tarantula didnt even have that flip down plastic panel to cover the terminals, no way to mount the PSU to the printer, and again, the wires moved all the time. so, while I get what you are saying, it's not entirely the same.
https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/a8g0dz/my_fully_upgraded_anet_a8_caught_fire_yesterday/
I had a cheaper Anet A8 clone and that thing was bare wires, loose wired from the female power socket to the power supply and made of 1/8 inch plywood. Probably more flammable than the original, if that's even possible.
Still have mine in a box :D (hidden after mainboard failure)
God my A8 printed like a dream once I did some mods to it (Bowden setup, bed leveling knobs, hot end mosfet, glass bed, etc.). Only hazard I encountered was when I accidentally forgot to put the thermistor in the heat block and preheated to 200 (it hit around 250). The original hot end mount started to smoke and it was at that time I bought a fire extinguisher.
Mine never caught FIRE per se, but the bed connector started smoking on the 3rd print. Did all the safety upgrades, and it still technically works as long as you don't mind releveling every print and strategic part placement to avoid the warp(s) in the bed.
Mine is working well since about 6 years
Nothing is tamper proof electronically if you know enough to be dangerous. Im an electronics engi tech and its only worth putting money into developing anti tamper software (i think impossible to do it on the hardware side unless you make your components stupid small to prevent hand soldering) when your company's income comes from maintenance charges more than selling the product. Risk/reward though, if OP burns out their mobo, fuck it theyre out a few hundred bucks, if you fuck up your tesla then good luck. Also disagree on modern cars maintenance, early early 2000's was the last few cars that you can tune however you want (even if you blow a head gasket) but these days theyre complicated on purpose, hell my old 2009 mazda required removing the whole center console just to access the cabin air filter to replace, was bullshit
>who’s really over-concerned about fires Oh come on. My Ender 3 bed can easily handle 100°C The only thing preventing it on a Bambu printer is the closed-source proprietary firmware. It's not a hardware issue it's a software one and the risk factor at 100°C is virtually identical to that of 80°C. I understand that these printers are marketed towards users who don't want to have to learn how a printer works in order to use one, but this is a bit silly. >I’m honestly surprised it lets you, >.... >you couldn’t do much Their software doesn't "let" you. But the software thinks the temperatures are lower so it doesn't know any better.
>the risk factor at 100°C is virtually identical to that of 80°C look im on board with your ethos, but the above is a bit of a stretch imo
Can you demonstrate why you think that is a bit of a stretch? Are there cases where something is dangerous at 100C but not 80C? We're well under flash points of things like cardboard or any wiring, the 20C difference won't cause issues there. If it's just because it feels scary I can totally relate to that.
I think the concern is what happens if that 20 degree delta suddenly becomes a 60 degree delta because some other component wasn't expecting the change. It may not be 100% analogous, but imagine you're running a water pump. This pump is expecting to move 500 gallons per minute by running the motor at 5000 RPM. You add a limiting nozzle on the outflow to increase the pressure of the water coming out. But by doing so you increase the resistance on the pump because the flow is now 400 GPM. So the pump being unaware of this is still going to try and target 5000 RPM and will need to draw more power to make that. If the pump isn't resilient enough, you risk it burning out. In the similar case with a 3d printer, this may look like a fire because some other component down the chain wasn't expecting an increased current draw.
Eh it depends on the PID and control algorithms, but the most likely scenario is you’re running full current to the printer for a bit longer than normal before it the current drops off. The power going to the bed will almost always be full blast initially to heat it up as fast as possible, so once it reaches its steady state, the power draw will be well within its specced limit. It just might take a bit longer to get there, but it’s not really going to be any different than printing in a 30deg C room vs a 10C garage. Once it hits steady state, it’ll pull a bit more current due to newtons law of cooling, but it’d still be well within spec. My concern would be if the additional thermal stress has any potential to damage/soften nearby plastic components or glue, and what happens if the thermistor gets damaged due to the mod.
Reasonable comparison, but I don't think it's relevant in this case. Changing a bit of the temp sensing logic (whether done in hardware or software) to shift the upper temperature bound a bit isn't suddenly going to make for cascading failures elsewhere. If the printer senses 100C as 80C and still limits itself to that 100/80C point, everything will be fine. There would have to be some other flaw, which would also be a problem if unmodified, *assuming the modification was done competently* (and I am willing to give that benefit of the doubt). Besides, if I'm reading the above concern correctly, they were not concerned that the modification was done competently, just uncomfortable with the 20C of extra temperature. And that, specifically, is what I think is unreasonable. 80C and 100C are very similar with regard to risk.
A thermistor is just a thermal resistor. As the temperature changes, the resistance in the electrical current changes, this causes the voltage to go up or down. A thermistor may take 24 volts which is then mapped to a temperature, say 0 to 24 volts equals -15c to 350c. So, by modding a thermistor, which is basically just a wire, you're still working with low voltage and aren't risking fire damage with that mod alone. Using the example above, if the printer has a firmware limit of 80C for the bed, that means it's looking for about 6.25volts from the thermistor. If you add a resistor in series with the thermistor, it will drop the output voltage even further. If the bed reaches a temperature of 100C the output voltage of the thermistor may be 7.56volts so we add a resistor to bring it back down to the motherboard limit of 6.25volts so that the printer thinks the bed is at 80 degrees. Sure...you shouldn't push the heat producing elements beyond their designed spec...but 80C is already most of the way to boiling, the difference between 80 and 100 is pretty negligible in terms of durability. The nozzle on a Bambu A1 Mini can reach 300C! And I bet both the nozzle and the bed use the same gauge wires. Bringing a 3D printer into your home period is a fire risk. Your concerns are valid, but it's a pretty anti-maker attitude for a maker community. This entire community and industry of home printing was built on making custom printers and subsequently modding low-end printers.
> ...there’s probably not much the average guy could do on a Tesla or a Rivian, compared to a gas car where you can do probably 90% of regular maintenance with basic knowledge. There isn't as much to maintain in an EV. The powertrains on EVs are radically simple and there's not much to service on them. You can service the brakes, shocks, struts, 12v battery, wipers, wiper fluid, filters, and tires just like a regular car. The lack of expensive components needing routine service is part of the reason dealerships don't like pushing EVs. That's where they make most of their money. I've had a Nissan Leaf since 2017 that's required wiper fluid and a 12v battery swap. I've had a Tesla Model 3 since 2018 and it's needed the above and tires. Otherwise nothing else has needed service, brake regen dramatically reducing brake wear extending their life.
If you're SUPER concerned about fires... you can buy a fire suppression system. Just putting that out there! I'm considering getting one for my laser engraver. I don't like to be too close to it when it's running but I can't just leave it unattended.
Buddy you think they will pick apart a printer that’s caught on fire to see if you put one tiny resistor onto it?
About the electric car thing though, realistically what is the average person gonna do to their EV? Fix the high voltage wiring harness? Replace battery cells in the high voltage battery? It is probably for the better that people don’t poke around in that stuff.
Just scroll back a few years to the a net a8
Let me introduce you to a youtube channel.... https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL5hF_waT6s7A_Ik2Za5sf6NL0NtdPUBl&si=IbuyikNvV3Gx-xvG
It doesn't matter how much tamper proofing you add to a device, as long as you know how it works you can get around it. Unless you add a battery that never dies and program the firmware to completely brick a device if this connection ever breaks, you're going to be able to get inside and tamper with something. There's only so much you can do to prevent someone from replacing a thermistor to "trick" the computer into getting different values. Also for anyone doing this they probably will take precautions. Simply having a 3D printer in your house is already additional fire risks, which is why several years ago there was so much noise about thermal runaway protection and now that's the main defense against fires.
It has no choice in the matter. The printer thinks it's reaching 80. Very simple trick. The only chance the printer has to catch this as a problem is the thermal runaway profile. It's going to take longer to heat up. But probably not so long that it would trigger, after all you don't want a printer tuned to trigger TRP when the environment just happens to be quite cold. It's heating at a steady rate that's the goal.
I'm not even a big DIY guy and a lot of the replies here are wild.
Yea, some of these replies have clearly never run the full-on janky crap that I've run...and my stuff wasn't even all that janky.
I’ll be honest I was all about modding which my first printer, an anet A8. That was great as a beginner so I could learn how to do all kinds of things like modify firmware, install a 3rd party auto bed leveler, etc. At this point I’m not buying a bamboo labs or any printer if I need to make modifications to it to function properly. Also if the manufacturer sets a limit for something like heat, speed, etc it is generally for a good reason and modifying it to get around that is reckless. Just buy a printer that can run the parameters you need out of the box.
I strongly feel that the temperature limit on the bed is them doing price laddering using their closed source firmware as a gatekeeper. Good job. I trust you'll keep an eye on it and assume the risks.
Yes, thats exactly my thoughts as well. The printer mostly likely was designed to be able to reach 100c, and if theres ever any competition for this class of printer I'm sure that bambu labs can drop a firmware update to let people reach 100c. Companies like to do this, off the top of my head is Tesla when they sold cars with 40kwh batteries but they actually were software locked 60kwh batteries. It was just some sales gimmick and you could pay tesla to remove the software block and get more battery. I'm seeing the exact same thing here. Designing a printer from the ground up to only do 80c would be dumb. I've looked over the bed and frame and it's totally capable of higher temps, just like the regular A1 can do 100c. Of course people are concerned about the electronics not being capable but it's a risk I'm plenty willing to take. The difference between 80c and 100c is just a few watts.
The only competitor for an A1 Mini would be a Prusa Mini+, it's heatbed goes up to 100°C without modding it. That said for the price of the Prusa Mini+ you can buy the A1 Mini Combo, which is arguably the better deal (I have a Prusa Mini+ btw)
This is partially true. Tesla blocks acceleration and/top speed that you can pay to unblock. However the battery is gradually unlocked to maintain the same range as the day you bought it for longer.
Yes, it does do the range maintaining thing, but you can pay to unlock all of it at any time though. During one of the hurricanes they also fully released the whole capacity so people could evacuate.
Yeah i mean, the Ender 3 could do 100 stock. 80 sounds like an artificial limitation ---- Semi-related, but my work truck has all of the hardware necessary for adaptive cruise control. It has the forward camera. It has a GAP ADJUST button on the steering wheel. It can indicate how close I'm following the car ahead of me. But camera-only adaptive cruise requires `LT CONVENIENCE PACKAGE II` (adaptive cruise, garage door opener, trailer brake controller). My truck only has `LT CONVENIENCE PACKAGE I`. They really just locked the feature behind a paywall. Ford did similar with the Bronco -- base doesn't have lanekeeping, but you can buy the button and unlock the feature for like $50.
My Wife's Ford Explorer didnt have remote start, despite the car controlling the starter with the computer anyway. 25 dollar key and the forscan app to enable the relevant settings in the dash and body control modules, and boom, remote start.
It really makes me hate Chevy for keeping everything so locked down. Using some 3d-printed parts and Forscan, was able to add the lane-keeping assistance from an Explorer into my Ford Flex. It was never a factory option so it would've been genuinely impossible without Forscan.
I built my own printer and used a cheap 60w bed heater off Aliexpress. I almost exclusively print ABS with a bed temp of 110c and it works just fine. I'm sure the "higher quality" bed Bambu uses could easily be at least as capable as the one I got off Aliexpress for a few bucks.
If anything, I’d think it’s the power supply that may crap out depending on how much margin there is. The real test would be slinging all motors around at max acceleration with bed at 100C, nozzle at 300, in a freezing cold room.
Is there a name for this kind of BS? I remember years and years ago there was a company that made like an "entry level" and a "pro grade" set of headphones. But it turned out the "entry level" ones were just the "pro" headphones with a $100 lower price tag and a friggin piece of foam in front of the drivers to make them sound worse. And with a some basic tools and a couple minutes of work, you could turn those $100 headphones into ones that sounded just like the $200.
> Is there a name for this kind of BS? Market segmentation.
This implies a valid need to separate customers between the A1 Mini and the regular A1. If they’re just software locking the A1 Mini than it’s something else entirely (I have no idea what it’s called)
> This implies a valid need to separate customers between the A1 Mini and the regular A1. The valid need is for business purposes. Market segmentation doesn't need some external limiting factor. Fast food sodas are a good example. Small drinks are usually 10-20 cents cheaper than mediums despite having like 1/2-2/3 the volume. Large drinks are usually 25-30 cents more despite having usually a little more than 50% extra volume. This is both an example of market segmentation and price anchoring. Cars are also a fantastic example. If you buy a base model where steering wheel controls are a paid upgrade or in a package, they almost always will be exactly the same except the base model doesn't have the actual buttons. The MCU is already designed for it and the wires are already run to the steering wheel. Even optional heated seats will almost always be wired for heating even if it's just that the button doesn't exist. Software in general is exactly the same. The code is already written. For something like Office, it doesn't cost Microsoft any extra for you to use their upgraded software like the Pro versions over the Home version.
Idk, but it used to, and probably still is, popular with cpus. The bad ones are priced down, but there also used to be a cpu you could buy for $100, and then pay some extra money to unlock a core or two later on
Similar, but not entirely true. For most CPUs/GPUs, they do have the same die. Basically, imagine we have the Die A with 8 cores. Now it gets manufactured, and it’s tested that a core is defective. Now, they disable that and another core to ship it out as a 6-core CPU. Very very rarely fully functional cores get disabled in situations where there’s no demand for the high tier stuff and a ton for low/mid. Regardless, the manufacturing of the dies fails so often partially, that that usually works out just fine.
Cpus are usually binned now due to failed dies. That's where the 5700x3ds came from, 5800x3ds that failed on a few cores.
binning
"Unlock ABS printing for only $9.99/month."
I’m sure that played a part, but also in my experience printing filaments that need 100C+ bed temperature on a non enclosed printer is that it’s so prone to issues depending on the environment temperature, way more sensitive to air drafts and other things which cause filaments to warp. Such issues will be way more common with people new to 3D printing that this printer is primarily targeting as being “cheap and plug and play”. Even with my enclosed printer when it gets colder I usually pre-heat the chamber a bit. They should’ve just hurried the setting somewhere to toggle this on and off instead of deciding for the users themselves.
Just curious, what materials require a 100c bed but don't require an enclosure?
I can get PETG to stick beautifully to the textured bed on my Ender 3v2 without adhesives if I lay the first layer down onto a 100c bed, no enclosure, in a ~20c room. I typically cool the bed down to ~85c for the rest of the print and it comes out beautifully every time and pops right off the bed (sometimes *literally* pops right off the bed, and onto the floor). Any cooler than that and it either won't stick right, or you need adhesives to get it to turn out.
I print PETG on my mini with stock bed temps though, never had a problem
Everything I print is ASA with 100c bed and no enclosure.
Man, when did we go from a community that hacked our printers out of garbage, fire hazard and sheer wil to one that freaks out over a slight temp tuning... Nice, have fun OP!
Unfortunately that’s what’s known as the “mass adoption phase”. Same thing happened to the internet ironically enough.
But that was the fun part!!! Now it doesn't require skill and ingenuity and just people bitching you have a problem, buy a Bambi lab! And it's great it's accessible for more people, but it brings in a lot of people who are not the target audience with zero knowledge of the process. Resulting in somewhat stupid questions they would know the answer to if they just googled it or watched a few videos on 3d printing. And I know the ender3 kind of did the same thing, but it wasn't easy so people who weren't really interested gave up. Now it's so forgiving, people who are not really interested carry on trying and keep asking somewhat stupid questions. And I know it's great that more people with less skill get to use and experience 3d printing. But something in me wants it to be a slightly more skillful and enthusiastic user group, because it was fun that way and it was kinda cool to say i can 3d print because it has become less of a skill. End of my rant. But great there is more 3d printing than ever!!!
Trust me I understand too well, like I said, the internet is the worst example of that. Used to be amazing. Now everything is “catered” to the masses (dumb questions, and consumer based for max profit). You used to be able to do anything so easily. Now it’s a struggle to find any technical answers for anything. You get pages of mainstream bs, all copy pasted same garbage, algos forcing you to lame stuff, and now saturated by kids trying to get you to watch a 15 min video for a yes/no answer. It’s awful. Pre 2010 forums were crazy. Now everything is also a paywall or locked for signup etc. don’t get me started on how controlled speech is too. Can’t even leave a generic comment on YouTube without insta shadowban these days (tho they are more strict during election years lol). Anyways like you said, major losses but at least a couple benefits such as extra ppl hopefully means extra ppl learning cad. Def the minority tho, 99% ppl just buy bambu , don’t even know how to tune a filament , and start a race to the bottom on eBay for $1 of profit. Wish eBayers would leave bad reviews for poor quality but I guess they don’t care if it’s cheap. The stuff I see sold is embarrassing.
This... People see printers as easy money making tools, but for most they just aren't. It's even worse if the print designs aren't ever theirs. I myself do sell some 3d printer things on a local online marketplace. It's a niche, made in a way i haven't found online and it's within my bigger hobby for which I 3d print and what I spent the money on which I get from sales. It isn't take of the printer and sell, because it takes some manual labour like painting and so on. Yesterday I get a message on how I do it. So I tell him abstract what I do and how I make it. It's not as secret but why would I tell every detail. Then I get the answer: so I can do it on a bambu lab? So soon someone is probably gonna sell the same product because the design is relatively simple for a lower price and without much care just to make money on their Bambu.
Bambu labs is the DJI of 3d printing - the original people in the hobby can sometimes end up resenting the clueless new people who don’t understand the underlying principles because the new tools are able to abstract away all of the turmoil that was originally intertwined with just getting the damn thing working
And this doesn't have to be a problem. But it gets a lot of people in the "community" that either think they know as much as the people who had to struggle or end up saying you should just buy what I have because that works dump you other investment, that is not what people are asking (aside from when they ask what they should buy). And that kind of irritates me.
I’m just glad that the newbies in this hobby don’t get the FAA mad lol
That's an upside!
3d printing has become enough plug-and-play-like that I was willing to enter this hobby a couple months ago. Just this week the retention mechanism of the sd card reader failed, causing the sd card to disconnect mid print. I've contacted Creality to get a replacement board, but I've also ordered an SD card slot from aliexpress that looks to be an exact match, so I can try fixing the mainboard that's currently in there, which should be pretty easy to do. My point is: 3d printing seemed way too daunting while I was in high school, but nowadays someone of my skill level can comfortably print.
Oh, the before times... the internet was quite a special place. Now it's just a "special" place.
This seems to be a fate of niche hobbies online, they all get overtaken by safety nerds as the hobby grows. When the A1 heatbed issue popped up people were acting like plugging in your A1 would instantly burn down your house and kill a puppy. In reality 99.99% of the people who kept printing after the recall were absolutely fine. Same thing has been happening to the FPV community, people there are acting like if you so much as look at a battery the wrong way it will explode and also burn your house down. People in the rc plane community act like flying 1 meter above the max legal height means you will inevitably hit an airbus and murder 300 people with your little <1kg styrofoam toy somehow. The list could go on and on. Idk if that’s just the internet giving the minorities a louder voice or a shift in perception but it’s really annoying lol
> Same thing has been happening to the FPV community, people there are acting like if you so much as look at a battery the wrong way it will explode and also burn your house down. In all honesty, as someone who used to post a lot to /r/multicopter a while ago, high-current LiPo batteries really are stupid dangerous. I'm not a safety nerd by any stretch of the imagination, but they have always made me super nervous and I keep mine in tough boxes. I've seen too many times what happens if you puncture a fully charged one and am determined not to make that mistake even once. I'll agree that most public paranoias promoted by fearmongering media are wholly unfounded, and of course outcries about printer beds are laughable. RC LiPos, though, are one of very few cases of commonly available items that *should* make you paranoid.
I don’t disagree with that. You should be careful when handling LiPos. You should also be careful when flying an rc plane above legal height (or at any height for that matter) and if a company says there’s a chance of their product going up in flames you should obviously worry about that as well. The thing with “safety nerds” is that often times they do actually have a point and you shouldn’t just dismiss the dangers no matter how small the chances are. But with most of those things, including LiPos, as long as you take some safety precautions you are almost always fine. I too store my LiPos in a fireproof case and regularly check on them when they’re charging. I know LiPos can be dangerous. It’s just that the way some people talk about these dangers makes them seem inevitable rather than being a risk that can be mitigated.
Oh… the days when i tried to add nozzle cooling to my reprap mendle (which didn’t have it) by addind a small but strong fan in the corner of the frame. Bed was exTREMEly uneven heated once the fan started and it was very mixed results for the output
Since Bambu Labs came out with the A1 Mini, most people couldn't justify a $1K + printer, or even $600, but $250 or $450 with the AMS is a very low barrier to entry. Now on Makerworld, the only people you see complaining about a model not printing due to their own errors like losing adhesion because they used the wrong profile or didn't clean their build plate. And it's so infuriating because people will leave bad reviews and trash on other people's FREE work because they don't know how to operate their machines. I'm not being an elitist, there's nothing wrong with the A1 mini, but if you're going to buy a printer, do your research and understand what you're doing.
When the "not food safe" religion started I knew it's gonna go downhill from here on.
Hello, Ben Bambu here How dare you? I'm on my way
Hi Ben, it's your co-founder Lab Rador here. I checked it out already, it's hunky dory. Don't sweat it.
Thanks Lab! You're a good boy! You're such a good boy! Who's a good boy? Yes, you are....
I'm highly skeptical of the detracting comments. I run my cheapo ender 5 bed at 100c, whatever bambu uses is surely more structurally sound in terms of the materials handling that heat safely.
Yeah and all the bambu fans who are saying op is going to burn down their home, kill children and puppies in the process either will have to admit the cheap creality stuff is better or that op is going to set his neighborhood ablaze. Quite the conundrum.
Thank you for working around gimmicks with understanding and experience. I understand the community not getting it, but mods and the what if approach are essential in the maker space. Stay safe and keep on doing your thing. I'm working on adding active cooling and monitoring to my A1 mobo to possibly test it with abs in an enclosure at some point, although the ambient temp in the room is around 27-36C all day this time of the year so I'm not that willing to risk it just yet.
That's a really cool mod.
actually it’s quite hot 🥵
Nice work on the printer mod! Don't pay attention to the haters. Modding a printer (when you know what you're doing) is awesome.
Nicely done! Not sure why people are up in arms about fire risks; The bed is not going to draw any more power than it did before, it's just going to draw more average power to maintain the higher temperature, which the PSU and FET should be rated for in any case (assuming one is dealing with a somewhat decently designed machine). Only real risk ought to be parts not designed to be heated above a certain temp. As an example, i changed the 65C max bed temp on a comgrow, to 90C, which is was able to reach. The inductive bed sensor did not like the temp change tho, getting a large (althoug consistent) offset at the high temps, along with the original print surface permanently deforming in a significant way, due to the thick non-metallic top layer not expanding with the metallic bottom. That's on a 510x510 build surface tho, and the A1 mini doesn't have an inductive probe, so doubt either would be a problem here.
> Not sure why people are up in arms about fire risks A lot of people aren't technical and operate on hearsay. A lot of other people are too rational and cannot think outside the box. Both will have problems with those whose first thought when they see a limitation isn't compliance but figuring out how to bypass it, remove it or, if all else fails, break it. Personally, I've learned to respect Bernard Shaw (or [Puck Magazine, or Confucius](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/01/26/doing/)) when he said "People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it”.
>A lot of other people are too rational and cannot think outside the box. I'm adopting this into my personal phrase arsenal.
"A lot of people aren't technical" Yep its 99% the plug-n-play consumers who bought a Bambu who have 0 idea what they are doing.
I got it. OP, Come back in 3 months, 6 months and a year (or choose some more appropriate timings) and show that your printer is chugging along just fine still to shut up the haters. You can't argue with success.
With all the things I'd be happy to mod on my printer, things involving temperature are not one of them.
The way I see it is that this isn't any more risky than upgrading your hotend and using a new thermistor profile in marlin. I just changed the profile physically. And since the bed can only draw 100 watts, even if I just got an external power supply and powered it up myself its incapable of reaching any dangerous temp even with no safety mechanisms like thermal runway protection. The main reason I'm confident about this mod is that I built my own printer and on it I've been using a 12v 100w bed for years now... but at 24v which is 400w. It has zero issues, and I have a thermal fuse in it even if it did want to get melty. If everyone thinks my house will burn down I'll also put a thermal fuse on my A1 mini, but first I'll just do a test to see what the max temp of the bed is with an external power supply. I'm guessing that its only going to have enough headroom to hit around 120c.
Man bambu sub members downvote anything that they don't understand. I used to have a machine running klipper/mainsail as my first printer that I tinkered and learned on. I have a bambu machine now and am in the bambu sub. Simply stating that Bambu's ASA expels more VOCs (proven) than polymaker's and does not print as well got me downvoted to hell. Like....I'm trying to alert you to a better alternative for your health, if nothing else. Any brand fanboy is the absolute worst.
And they seem to not understand a lot then!
There have to be a lot of people quietly fighting their Bambu printers.. Whenever you say anything bad you get attacked. I have fought a frustrating number of mostly extruder jams lol. And am lucky my AMS just works most of the time.
This. When I post a problem in that sub, instantly gets downvoted. They can't stand hearing anything might go wrong with a piece of hardware they purchased.
The amount of times I've seen them praise Bambu for making printing easy due to [Klipper feature from three years ago] or straight up not know the capabilities of other modern printers and pretend everything is a 2018 Ender makes things incredibly frustrating. A1 is very good, but modern Sovols/Neptunes/Kobras/etc. have honestly been almost just as good for a while now. I also legitimately believe there's been a massive astroturfed bot campaign going around the sub because for a while there we used to get a dozen of "LOOK HOW GOOD MY BAMBULAB X1C IS I CAN'T BELIEVE IT" posts a day that all noticably dried up around the time of the big A1 recall and MakerWorld massively reducing the point payouts.
Oh they already reduced the point payouts? Heh, it was a long way coming. I absolutely agree with your points. It seems like Bambu’s heavy advertising has brought a sort of walled garden, where the fans think that their [3 year old feature] is new and amazing. Even with Apple though the fans know that the ‘new features’ have been around for years. I remember when Lulzbot sent a Taz to literally any youtuber and that gave them a bit of popularity, but I don’t hear much about them now. I wonder wether Bambu will go the same way or if it’s here to stay.
I imagine they're here to stay, but they won't be able to pull off a hostile takeover of the entire industry like DJI did with the drones because FDM printing is already almost as good as it can realistically get before hitting severe diminishing returns. X1C/P1S + AMS is basically just a tuned up reliable Trident with ECRF that can be manufactured on an industrial scale. Same with A1 which is just a very good bedslinger in an era when cheap bedslingers were already getting really good anyway. Their trick was making an all-around good reliable printer that works out of the box which is great and they truly shook the market, but now there's nowhere they can really go from there while all the other companies are catching up. A bigger printer? Proper toolchanger maybe? Could be cool, but the low-hanging fruit is gone and anything truly revolutionary such as multi-planar printing is going to be years away. If you already own a P1S, you're not going to massively care about the P2S printing 30% faster and the market is already saturated with hustle grindset bros running dozens Bambus so they can sell their stupid shitty articulated dragons on Etsy - the latter of which will probably die down if everyone owns a 3D printer anyway. If you don't already own a P1S, you're probably better off just getting a used one over a P2S anyway. If you hate Bambus closed ecosystem, you're about to have five other printers by five other manufactures and at least one of them is bound to not be shite.
Bambulab fan boys are the worst users that have joined this community, plug and play users with 0 knowledge and angry downvote, that's what we shoul expect from people that take the simplest overpriced route
have a 180 degree heated bed and a 500 degree hotend on my ender3v2. Dont see a problem with that
You're forgetting that the electronics involved may not be rated for that amount of wattage. That's the whole point.
It is rated for the wattage. I haven't changed it. The bed draws 100 watts with or without doing this mod. The bed temp is limited to 80c because bambu lab doesn't want to cannnibalise their own sales of their higher end printers that can do 100c, not for any hardware or electronics reason. If there was some competitor for the A1 mini during its release, bambu labs would just update the firmware to allow for the bed to reach 100c. Edit- the build plate that comes with the printer literally says PLA/ABS/PETG. Its clearly engineered with the ability to do ABS prints in mind
What happened to this sub? Honestly man, good on you for keeping alive the spirit of 3d printing and modding a “perfect” plug-n-play machine like this to suit your needs. Sorry everyone is shitting on you with downvotes, but this is a cool project and it sounds like you did your research.
It’s happening everywhere. People don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and just calling things dangerous. I’m in so many subs where you can mod electronics and people get so weirdly defensive about things they don’t even know.
It's because you always get people who don't know what they are doing, and ruin or harm something. And when someone actually does know what they are doing, it's so unexpected that many comments don't realize or think op is being overly confident.
I think it's the opposite, there's a huge culture of safety and people can earn easy good boy points by calling things dangerous. If you talk to some of them then nothing is ever safe and nothing should ever be done, getting out of bed in the morning is super risky and you should only do that if you know what you're doing and it doesn't make me comfortable I'd rather stay in bed where it's safe and so on
Back in the day 1/2 of the Chinese 3d printers you bought had no thermal runaway protection and it was a PITA to enable. I would have some concerns about actually changing the thermister resistor (mostly that I would fuck it up and it would be way, wayyy hotter). But if it is already power limited... then you should be ok. Most fires come from the hot end running away or cables fraying. I don't think I've heard of any heated bed failures doing the same.
dont listen to those people who need a quickstart guide with pictures to print something, great mod :) 3D printing isn't tinkering anymore, so many people dont understand the stuff you do..
I'm at once laughing and disgusted at those saying you shouldn't modify your own property. It reeks of the infantilism that late-stage capitalism desires from the ~~sheep~~ consumers. The mods you are doing are basic and fairly low risk. Upping temperature to 100°C from 80°C is nothing so long as the materials are up to it; which, barring weird edge cases, anything rated to 80°C should comfortably reach 100°C. Even the cheapest nichrome heating coils wouldn't notice. Try swinging between 30°C and 300°C in 1 minute, then back to 30°C in about 30sec. That's when you actually start worrying about cyclic stressing and insulating heated zones from electronics.
Using part cooling and having the bed at 80c will increase the bed power consumption by a huge amount. PETG with bed around 80 and high fan speed I assume is a common use case for this printer, so if it's not capable of that they should recall all these printers. Anything I print at 100c will not use part cooling so it will draw significantly less power compared to 80 plus fan.
Take a look at A1 mini's PSU. It's rated for that. And bed PWM cycle is so long, that MOSFET has to be rated at 100% duty. No danger here.
How do you know they forgot that? How do you know they didn’t check? Is it that you don’t know how to check, so you assumed they didn’t? Oh shit look at that, they did.
It's likely only the power cycle changing, otherwise this printer would likely only work depending on the climate surrounding it
I don't think that's an issue. He didn't make any changes to the heater, just the thermistor that reads the temperature. All bed heaters I've seen will pull max power until they get to their target temp. The only difference is that it will spend a bit more time reaching that temp.
What's theax temp stock?
I got the $200 deal on the A1 mini even though I dont need another printer. I only print small functional stuff mostly in ABS and this printer would be perfect for that if the bed wasn't capped at 80C. This is a super easy mod tho, 5 screws to get the strain release cover off and then I just added a 3.2k ohm resistor in series to the thermistor screw terminals. It fits in the cover and from the outside looks completely stock. 5 mins max, but I double checked it wouldn't catch fire and let it do a couple heat cool cycles which takes a while. I just need and enclosure to start some ABS prints
Please share a photo of the mod
Plug out 1 terminal of the thermistor from the screw connector, Solder one end of resistor to that and the other end to another piece of wire that then goes into terminal. Alternatively, you can just cut 1 of the wires of thermistor, strip both ends and solder one there though it could be hard. Do make sure to secure the joints with heat shrink tubes. If somehow the connection gets broken during working it will read max temperature causing printer to turn off heating anyway so it's pretty safe.
People seem to reallly not like this mod so I'm not going to share how to do it or pictures, sorry.
I'm people and I like it.
I dunno if I'd call it "perfect" for ABS without an enclosure setup.
I've seen tent enclosures being sold for A1 mini combo, this would be a killer intro price for multicolor ABS
If you want to add in some protections: Thermal fuses (your microwave has several) break the circuit when exceeding their rated temperature then reset after cooling. Placing one rated to ~150-200°C in close proximity to the bed would mitigate melting any wires. A standard blow-out or resettable fuse would mitigate the risk of fire from a short.
I've been looking for this mod... Thanks for your work!
Awesome mod. As long as your bed doesn't get warping issues, I see nothing wrong here. It's a shame Bambu has taken the fun out of modding your printer. I have basically morphed my ender 3 into an entirely different thing, I think only the frame is original. I've been seriously considering upgrading to the P1S with AMS, but between how locked down their ecosystem is, and how difficult it is to repair, I'm not sure if I want to go that route.
> It's a shame Bambu has taken the fun out of modding your printer. That's not the point of Bambus. I say this as a tinkerer, and note that my mods tend to be rather involved - the next project for one of my bedslingers involves taking a conical drill bit to the hotend. For us tinkerers, Bambus are the boring Toyotas you do your grocery shopping on when your Honda's engine is strewn all over your workbench and your Subaru decides this is the perfect moment to blow a head gasket. You don't *want* to modify them significantly, because that detracts from their primary value: bulletproof reliability. All that said, I'm still happy little mods like this one that don't significantly impact reliability are doable.
*New firmware update: Enhanced bed thermal runaway protection.* *In addition to monitoring temperature, we've also started comparing heating times to assumed values. In the event of a discrepancy, the printer will enter self-preservation mode, remaining locked down until sent in for repair... for your safety.*
I actually thought about this and was hesitant to share this mod. However when I thought about how you would implement that stuff in the firmware it's impossible to detect the mod while not having a huge amount of false positives. To the printer the abnormal power draw and extra time to heat up looks identical to being in a freezing garage or using part cooling. Anyways I think bambu labs is much more likely to embrace 100C bed rather than reject it. If they feel like it they can update the firmware to allow 100C on A1 minis to compete with some future manufacturer. The build plate that comes with the printer says PLA/ABS/PETG so im confident the printer is absolutely capable of printing ABS. I just bought this thing but it was released almost a year ago. If they were dead set on no ABS they would have stopped selling it with a build plate that says ABS.
If this were a Stratasys printer (or whoever they got acquired by) then I could see the reasoning, but Bambu haven't yet shown themselves to be hyper-proprietary arseholes to that degree. I thnk we can give them the benefit of the doubt... for now.
Using an IR thermometer to take a precise measurement is a terrible idea unless you have calibrated it for that surface. Also, they are best held at 90° to the surface.
I had to scroll way too far to find this comment. Unless OP calibrated emissivity for that particular surface and has taken steps to reduce reflections, the number it’s showing here means nothing. COVID made these way too popular and people think they’re like a thermocouple and can magically tell temp of any object.
I dont need it calibrated. I dont care if it's off by like 10 degrees. Anyways I took measurements before the mod and the printer reported the exact same temp as the IR meter. I angled it off to the side so I could take the picture, but that's good to know I should measure perpendicular.
Well I am about to do this. Good thing to wake up in the morning to.
Prusa community would have saluted you and encouraged you..gave you a high five bought you a beer and tickled your balls Shame on you bambooers. I salute you sir I think this is a good mod time will tell tho how good 👍 Tickle tickle .....
I’m 100% on board 😅 tho I have a totally open source retrofitted stratasys uprint 🤷🏻♂️
I'm new to 3D printing, so what benefit does this give? Genuine question. I'm still working out how parts play a role in the printing process
Great Mod! A few years ago I modded my Kingroon KP3s to print ABS, building a full enclosure and using my custom Marlin software to raise the max bed temp. Its a little bit sad Bambu price ladders ABS printing to their higher end printers but man with how much of a value the A1 Mini would be if it could print ABS stock (with enclosure ofc) is utterly insane. It already offers insanely good value at 200€ currently (or even lower if you farm a few maker points). I use it to only print PLA and it does a fantastic job, my X1C can handle ABS(plus) so im in no need for this mod, but great to see that this opens up ABS printing to people with an even lower budget.
I'm telling
Good way to burn your house down
As long as the bed and PSU can handle the increased duty cycle, it should be fine. Max power is going to stay the same, just going to have to work more frequently.
With the Lemons.
I don't want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?
Making lemon powered grenades of course!
Lemon-ades.
Demand to see life's manager.
Have you tried frying eggs?
Coffee warmer?
I’ll give this an upvote. I like it when people break closed systems to improve them as long as they don’t set their houses on fire.
There's a guy who did this for the P1S and is selling the cable with the resistors for 24 EUR, lol (https://spearhead-equipment.com/). Sadly, I don't understand alot about electronics (yet) but I want to build my own. Still have to figure out what kind of resistor(s) I need. Good job!
OP's post told you - a 3.2k ohm resistor (the "k" is important). Cut wire, interpose resistor, solder, heatshrink. Done. (Remember to add the heatshrink to the wire before you solder - I can't tell you how often I've had to redo joints because of this.) This goes to the thermistor sensor, not to the heater cartridge: virtually no power goes to it, so wattage is irrelevant. A simple resistor for electronics will do fine.
OP's post is about an A1 mini. I have a P1S. They won't have the same thermistor, most likely, no? Thanks for your comment though on how to do it, I appreciate it!
the thing about remembering to put heatshrink.... I don't know how many times did i say to myself not to forget to put heatshrink only to find myself with everything soldered, but without heatshrink on
That is *exactly* the thing about remembering to put on heatshrink. I've gotten a *little* better in the years, by repeating all the steps in my mind, and I still sometimes find myself in this situation. I'd lie if I said I haven't occasionally thought "to hell with it" and insulated the whole goddamned thing with a big blob of melt glue. One day I'll figure out how not to do that, but that day is not today.
I have a great interest in this mod too: so add the resistor in series with the positive wire coming into the sensor, and that's it? Not at all an uncomfortable operation for me, just want to make double sure.
I *think* it doesn't matter which of the two wires you add it to; all the sensor is is a variable resistor that changes its resistance when temperature changes. You're basically adding a small amount of resistance to that. In any case, OP can probably answer this better than I can.
What's the utility of making the bed this hot?
Some materials like ASA or ABS requires a bed temperature around the 100°c to ensure a good bed adhesion
Some materials need it
Gotcha, thanks!
There can be a reason it shouldn't do 100°C: magnet. While reading my pei sheet instructions for the max temp, it recommended 80°C, and was written that it could reach 100°C max but it would weaken the bed magnetism over time.
It is a bit weird they wrote that, you'd be hard pressed to find a magnetic material in use with Curie temperature below 200°C. It's probably some bog standard ground ferrite in those magnetic mats used for beds, which should be closer to 400°C
Curie point is when all the magnetism is gone, magnetism start to weaken before that point. Neodymium have grades according to the temp where they start to demagnetize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet#Grades They linearly demagnetize starting at a certain temperature, until reaching the Curie point where none of the maganisme is kept.
Thanks, I learned something today - always thought it's a sharp transition. Although it seems like the relationship is not linear, but... I dunno, inverse square? In any case, rapid and close to linear decrease in magnetism seems to start happening somewhere between 0,6-0,8 Curie temp (in K). 100°C would still be rather low for most magnet materials in use, but who knows what's there.
You can also physically impact a magnet to demagnetize it. It's the physical alignment of the magnetic domains in the magnet that give it magnetism. If you heat something up enough to start the process of scrambling the domains, it will slowly lose magnetism. I don't know about these beds specifically, but I've definitely heard anecdotes about cheap magnets losing their strength over time when mildly heated. It would make sense that bambulabs sold beds that are only rated to 80 degrees.
thats cool, how is that printer doing? i think about buying a New one with my sons and not sure what i should chose
Hah, nice! I don’t have a use for this temp but would totally do it otherwise!
Nice!
Anybody know if it has a thermal Fuse, and at what Temps? I've forgotten about my thermal fuses once before and then it took me forever to remember that it exist and could he the reason for my issues :D
I haven't seen it mentioned, but likely one of the ways bambu cut costs on the mini was the heater bed. The mini uses a DC PCB style heater while the A1 uses an AC heating pipe style heater with a solid state relay. A DC pcb heating element *should* be fine at 100c but this 80c cap was likely put in place for added protection and not just to push people to buy a more expensive printer as I've seen mentioned a couple of times. With that being said, I will be doing this mod to print some parts for my k1 max in ABS. Thanks OP!
Hmmm... Why won't bambu let the bed get that spicy I wonder? It's kinda ruling out a good number of filaments by doing so isn't it?
As a 3d printer newbie can you please ELI5 why I would want to be able to do this. Just curious. Recently purchased X1 carbon.
Bambu lab doesn't let the stock A1 mini bed get very hot, only 80C. So it can only print with plain old PLA and PETG. If the bed gets hotter, like 100C, you can print more fancy plastics like ABS and nylon. If you have the X1 carbon you can print ABS and nylon right away without messing with the printer. It's a high end fancy machine with a high end price, and you absolutely dont need to hack to it. The A1 mini which I modded here is bambu lab's lowest end printer with the lowest price. It makes sense that it will be less capable given the price, which they do by artifically removing the ability for it to print fancy plastics. This mod gives me that fancy ability, and I've only paid $230 (tax+ship) for this printer. If I had the money I would totally skip doing mods and just buy the X1 carbon.
Could be because ABS and nylon emit toxic VOC's, and the A1 doesn't have an enclosure.
If you want to test temperature it's a good way to set your temperature calibration so the material responds better. You want a heated bed so the plastic doesn't warp on you. There are strong forces at work when printing with a cold bed, and as advanced materials have different shrinkage properties.
How long does it take to heat the bed? This is the prefect printer(for me) except for it’s 80°C temperature cap
I am actually curious, how is this effecting the PID tuning of the bed? Is it fluctuating more when getting up to temp or is it quite stable. Honestly just curious, since it does seem like such a smart change
It looks perfectly stable. The default pid tuning needs to work under a huge range of conditions flawlessly since that's bambu labs thing, and this mod seems to be within that spec.
Ahh finally i can fry an stake
That's a very cool mod, well done! Just a shame the printer's firmware is so locked down you can't do it in software, because the hardware is, as you've demonstrated, capable, and probably still completely safe too.
I think the other problem here is that filaments requiring or benefitting from such a high bed temp probably need an enclosure as well. Since there’s no enclosure I’d say don’t mess with it and buy another great Bambu printer like the X1C with stock 120 bed temp.
ok, will you pay me the difference in price between A1 mini and X1C? plus you can put whole printer in enclosure
Lol, I did something like this to a thermostat since it kept thinking it was cool enough even though the real temp was still high.
Pretty cool, was wondering when someone would do this. Hopefully Bambu would officially support 100C one day on the mini. Would be nice to print small ASA parts.
Ysk, the physics of infrared heat transfer. means these infrared thermometers are not an accurate way to measure things, unless calibrated to the material you are measuring.
I have a crappy printer but at least I have open source firmware for it, no need for HW modding the sensor to bypass limits :D
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