Bambu labs P1P 3D Printer Review

Automatic Material Station

The AMS (Automatic Material Station) can be purchased separately and adds the ability to print with 4 spools at once. It sits on top of the machine on some 3D printed legs, that you print yourself.

It adds some beauty to the 3D printer in my opinion, while keeping filament clean, dry and ready for printing in multi color or multi material.

An underestimated benefit of the AMS module is the ability to just keep different materials loaded, so setup for a project is fast and efficient. Have 2 PLA spools in different color and some PETG and PC loaded for example, and you can attack most projects without manually switching filament.

The crazy thing is that you can add up to 4 AMS-systems PER printer, enabling up to 16 colors/materials in one print!

A great Multi Color experience

For me personally the AMS have been working great except for one spool (Bambu lab spool) where I tried loading a non-bambu lab refill on.

It accidently got too tight during assembly and the spool ended up not closing perfectly, and became slightly too wide which made it friction inside the AMS. Respooled it and problem was solved.

Another nice feature in the AMS is the RFID tags that come with bambu lab materials. It will just pop in and let you recognize the spool inside the slicer, and it’s location in the AMS.

I’ve had my bambu lab P1P a few months now and it has changed my perspective on 3D Printing.

I’m mostly 3D Printing my own designs, or practical things at home. My print location is in my work-from-home office. The 3D printing room i built had to go when we got our child.

This means I’m always “listening” to the printer or just having it close by. Having a fast printer suddenly made all those 5-12 hour projects actually viable, as print speeds are 2-4x faster and they can run overnight, or just don’t bother me for as long.

General operation

The P1P (and all other Bambu lab printers) are cloud based, so the day to day operations are suited for an always-connected 3D Printer. For me, this works great and I’ve had no issues after the initial setup (with the machine just being released) being a bit tricky. Nowadays, it’s more or less smooth as butter for most users.

This cloud based system lets you use both an app to monitor, and get notifications when the print is ready. this works great on my iPhone. I can leave the house and just tune in to the camera and see if it’s all going well.

Sending prints is fast and has always worked for me. There is a “backup” solution of using an SD-card if you prefer that instead.

Bambu lab Slicer

The Bambu lab slicer has had some controversy when it comes to open/closed source. I know to little about it to explain it here.

For me, as a user, the most important thing is functionality. The Bambu lab slicer works fantastically for me. Tons of settings if you run “advanced” setup, and it communicates well with the printer, sets up AMS and colors quite simply.

You may need to read through the wiki once or twice to fully get how Bambu lab uses projects, settings and syncs those to AMS. When loading a project, you can often have to map the project AMS-slots to the actual slots in your machine at the time. The saved project don’t know that you’ve swapped blue from Slot 1 to 3 for example.

Slicer Speed

The slicing is really fast on all basic projects. It’s really fast to get a fantastic overview of how much material you’ll use. This is specially important since you can see how much “poop” your multi-color prints will consume. This purging of material still needs optimization and smart inventions to be even less wastefull.

One thing I’m missing is the speed-presets that you can do on-board the machine. Taking it from normal to faster and Ludicrous.

Closed system pros and cons.

Is proprietary automatically bad? I don’t think so. Not when it works very well. The Bambu labs 3D Printers uses their own parts like hotends/nozzles that are not 3rd party compatible. The benefits are that it just works, and although you pay a bit extra for each time you need a new nozzle, it’s a smoother process for most of us.

The same goes for firmware and slicer. Although Bambu Labs slicer seems to have been copied from others, it’s incredible well thought out and works really well, with very few features one could wish for. And if there are requests, they are pretty fast at updating and adding features.

The AMS - Automatic Material Station for example, is not a open-sourced solution, and cant be “adjusted” for those who wants to. But I don’t see there a reason to either. It' works fantastically.

I can’t really recall any features that the community wants the Bambu labs 3D Printers to have. Well, other than the whole “cloud-connected-3D-printer” system. That means that although not a open-source solution, they have a great product and caters to most users needs.