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Bambulabs just released a new A series of printers, and I just could not pass up the deal. I grabbed an A1 mini with 4 spool AMS for $150

I had to give the prusa back to my son in law, so this fills the gap and lets me play with the bambulabs tools a bit and try AMS printing.

The first thing I tried was coloring and printing a dragon model I’ve had for a while. I think it came out pretty well.

And I love printing magnets

Overall not too bad so far, but the waste is just terrible. Every color switch feels like losing entire layers of filament. On layers that use all 4 colors its really aweful. Speed is hit badly as well. But the results are what matter, and the prints look excellent.

While the buffers have helped a ton in giving me better consistency, I would really like to move to a large gear extruder for better management. I printed up some new housings based upon the Galileo 2 Extruder and have been doing some fit testing.

So far things look good, but the printer is working so well right now its hard to justify a teardown and install. The design is also still pending some final tweaks, so I may hold off installing for a bit. I have a number of things I would like to swap out now including the main MCU.

I’ve gone through a few revisions of the buffer, but it’s got a few design issues I have not been able to resolve. Part of the problem is loading new filament into it is very tricky, but the path the filament takes is to tight of a u-turn. I’ve gone back to the drawing board and am trying a new idea. Instead of mounting it on the side or rear of the printer, it will be mounted vertically on top.

The new buffer has the extruder above the run-out sensor. The idea is to have the extruder pull filament from the spool, and push it down to the run-out sensor. The “buffer” is now a short length between the extruder and the sensor. The extruder is not rigidly attached to the buffer, and slides along guide rails as the buffer fills. A switch on the extruder rides one of the guide rails, and triggers when the buffer is full.

The buffer extruder is mirrored off of the main extruder in the toolhead, but is tuned to be slightly faster in order to fill the buffer. Ideally, they run at the same rate most of the time.

Unfortunately the plastic guides are not working well. I’m going to pickup a couple 100mm rails with sleds to reduce friction, and keep everything aligned. Here’s a video of it working.