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Learning to Use the Bambu P1P 3D Printer

This blog post is a short set of notes on using the Bambu P1P 3d Printer. My thanks to my 3d printing gurus – Rebekah and David without whom I wouldn’t have had the courage to write this.

Printer Overview

The Bambu P1P printer is:

Assembly

I’ve now assembled 2 of these and the assembly process is basically:

  1. Unbox it.
  2. Remove the bed screws
  3. Add the pla mount with the right set of screws
  4. Add the pla feed tube.
  5. Go thru the onscreen prompts, firmware update and registration; the slowest part was that the registration email took forever to arrive.

My first action on printer #1 was to just start printing using one of the supplied model files. I didn’t worry about calibration or anything and it just worked.

Loading PLA

PLA loading is trickier than some because the current firmware (or at least what was current after my last update) seems to tie into bed alignment NOT temperature control (i.e. you go to set the temperature and it gives you a multiple setting facility where you are changing positioning not temperature).

The work around for this is to use the unload feature to get the nozzle up to temperature and then put new PLA in.

Slicing

There is separate Bambu slicing software which is, sadly, of mediocre quality. The slicing operations work and the support warnings seem to be superfluous (or at least things printed even when I ignored the warnings). A bug in the software is that when you import an STL file, it imports into the context of the current project (and you can only have 1 project open at once).

The work around for this is to quit or close between operations.

Here’s the workflow for options:

  1. Find an STL file
  2. Open or Import the STL file into Bambu
  3. Hit the slice button.
  4. Export to gcode. My recommendation is to prepend a “bambu_” prefix onto the file if you have more than 1 3d printer as slices are printer specific.

Glue Sticks

A common work around for models detaching during printing is to apply glue stick to the base between prints. This has only been needed for dragon eggs for us not for whole dragons or kitsune.

Sidebar: I believe I was wrong above; I saw the head of one of the turtles detach during the print process so we definitely need to glue stick always.

Using the Pause Button

When you have a failed print, the pause button is a logical thing to press. Apparently this actually does pause the printing process and then you can resume it – but if you forget you paused it, you clear the bed then the bambu will let you select the next thing to print BUT not tell you that you have a print paused.

Solution: Go to the home page for the printer (top left icon) and select the Stop icon.