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My experience with BambuLab A1 and 3D printing

My experience with BambuLab A1 and 3D printing

Denis Nuțiu's photo
Denis Nuțiu
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4 min read

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Introduction

Hello everyone, 👋

This is my first post of 2024, and ever since I’ve started the blog in ~2018, I’ve had engineering Programming, Cloud and Engineering! 👨‍🔬; in the blog’s description. 😄

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I made a few posts related to “engineering” other than Software Engineering. In 2018, I was still studying computer science and engineering at UPT, and I was fascinated by the Electrical Engineering courses. I figured that I’d write blog posts about circuit analysis techniques such as Ohm’s Law, Thévenin’s Theorem, Mesh Analysis, and so on.

I wrote a few of them and focused solely on Software Engineering and a few posts on Embedded.

3D Printing

In this post, I talk about my experience with my first 3D printer the Bambu Lab A1 and modeling real world objects using open-source CAD software.

The printer is intuitive to use. I got my first print withing minutes after the initial setup and calibrations.

You don’t need to perform manual calibration since the printer can self-calibrate before every print. On the first run, it will do a more thorough calibration. Other than that, you will need to perform monthly or weekly maintenance, which is well documented on Bambu Lab’s website.

Software support is available on all the major platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux and Android.

You can print everything from your phone (with fewer customization options) because the printer is connected to your Wi-Fi network.

Since I got the printer, I successfully printed:

  • Ice Scrapper — To scrap ice from my car’s window. 😎

  • Cutlery Holder - I threw the old one away since it was getting dirty.

  • Raspberry PI case - This was the most fun print. A case that fits my Raspberry PI perfectly and just snaps in place.

  • Phone Holder - For those moments when video calling my family and I need to do something else as well.

I’ve also used open source and proprietary software to model objects. I modeled and printed a box for my audio interface and another box for the Raspberry PI case. I glued the boxes to some furniture to hide the objects 😅.

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I glued my audio interface under my desk. The next thing I’m going to glue under my desk is the KVM switch.

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This is my Raspberry PI, which reads climate data from a BME680 sensor and displays it on my phone (using Homekit) and records values to a prometheus instance allowing me to view a historical record of values in a Grafana. I wrote more about this project in the BME680 Home Assistant Integration post. (I did not project the case from the image myself).

If you plan on buying a 3D printer yourself, you can find lots of free models on websites such as:

printables.com

To model objects I’ve started, using a program called Fusion 360 and I did not like the fact that it requires an active internet connection to use since all computations are done in the cloud. Another reason I do not like this program is the cost. There is a free limited edition for personal use (for 3 years?), but it is pretty costly for a hobbyist to buy a license for it.

Then I stumbled across FreeCAD, which is open-source and free to use! 🤯

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YouTube is full of FreeCAD tutorials.

Closing Thoughts

I did not expect to have so much fun 3D printing things for my home and friends. Initially, I bought the printer to print D&D miniatures and I got an FDM printer because of the lack of space in my apartment.

The printer got useful really quickly when I printed a box for hiding my audio interface under my desk and some cable clippers, helping me to effectively reduce cable clutter.

BambuLab A1 is an easy and straightforward to use printer. The price of the printer is fair, and if you’re looking for more advanced printers, you can find them on their website. I like that everything just works straight out of the box, the printer has Wi-Fi, a camera for monitoring, notifications for my mobile phone when something goes wrong, easy pause and resume for prints, auto calibration, easy setup and maintenance.

The open-source community also offers us a great and capable tool FreeCAD that we can use for free to bring our designs to life.

Thank you for reading! 📖

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