The Surprising Power of Bambu Lab A1 Mini: Learn Why Size Doesn't Matter

hey guys now in today's video we're going to be taking a look at a real special product that came over to the channel we were thoroughly surprised and very grateful to Bamboo lab for sending us the A1 Mini uh we had been eyeing this when we saw it first announced and frankly I was a little skeptical when I first saw this printer scratching my head as to why and for who and I have to say we have fallen in love with the A1 Mini so in this video we're going to take a look at the features we're going to take a look at the uh print quality and we're also going to talk about who who is this printer for so let's get right to it now when we saw the A1 Mini we asked ourselves who is the target market for the A1 Mini why would bamboo lab come out with a smaller 3D printer not a larger one cuz let's face it all of us are looking for a larger p1p p1s or even an X1 Carbon looking for a larger form factor so when we got our hands on this we started tinkering and we started playing and a couple things to highlight the bed itself is a 180x 180x 180 bed very small and that was one thing that I thought could be a an issue for me but what I've learned is that as I was using this printer I found that this bed size is great for prototyping and for some of the prints that we do for our ATC store absolutely fantastic because I'm getting the speed and the quality that would get for the larger printers but it's something that is smaller and more compact matter of fact this is something that I could live in my office I don't need the X1 Carbon I don't need the p1p or p1s in my office this could go in there and it's also ultra quiet in addition to that you have the speed that you would expect from a bamboo lab printer 500 MB per second print uh 1,000 mm per second movement so you're going to be able to get fast prints uh the other thing is that the construction on this printer we're talking about a steel uh an extruded aluminum build this thing is solid and one of the things that you'll see in a couple seconds is we've named all of our bamboo printers after speedsters because they're so fast uh this one we named Kid Flash CU it's so small and we have the Flash and we have some other ones in the house but the Kid Flash here is also has a stainless steel nozzle uh 300 C and the nozzle itself that you see right here goes anywhere from 2 04 06 and 08 this has a or it comes with a04 and it prints spectacular you're going to see the the quality of that it has a textured Pei sheet and we can see it right here we'll go ahead and and lift this sheet and you can see the how the sheet is and the sheet has been printing quite a bit um it's magnetic as you saw so I can just put it back in place just like this and it basically has a max temperature of 80c now not super hot if you're looking at some of the other material types but this works for what we're doing which is mostly uh pla that we print on this machine it does have a camera and you'll notice This little light right here and it has a little camera right there that camera is a 1080p camera and given the position given the lighting I've shown this to some of the F my friends on my phone and they go like wow that's a better that's a better camera or looks better than the X1 or the p1p or the p1s who would have known it may be because of how it's open and how much light is coming in but things are really clear as well now with that camera you all also have the ability to do a time lapse so you'll be able to see your prints and you'll do your time lapse as well it does have have a filament runout sensor in addition to having the filament run out sensor has power loss recovery it has also uh filament tangle sensors as well some have complained that the filament tangle sensor has gone off or tripped off I haven't had that problem but I'm also running the L his firmware uh so that's also important Wi-Fi all right so you don't have to come to it you can just do things through the phone or through the uh through the desktop app and then the other thing is that the the material types and you see that I have something back here which is their AMS it's a little bit different than the AMS that we've seen in the other printer basically you can have pla petg TPU or PVA those are kind of like the recommended type materials that you'd want to print on this you don't want to go anything beyond that but the big standout feature is again in addition to the uh size itself is the fact that you have an AMS now that means that this printer can print multicolor prints and you can see one of the ones that we did right here this is uh a part of a light box that when illuminated you'll see uh the gym shoes this is actually came from the marketplace on uh the bamboo lab Marketplace I'll put a link for those of you who are interested in this in the description area and then we'll also U highlight who the author is in the video in the footer that you should see in a couple seconds so you'll be able to get color now the AMS is a little bit different it reacts a little bit different as well so you'll notice that you have all of the filament uh coming up to the uh the print head here and you could actually see all of them here they're not all the way in but you can see them fed all the way up to this point so the prints do go a little bit faster when it comes to color changing because it doesn't have to um again travel the entire path because there's not just one tube but there's four tubes that it's going through that's the other thing now the AMS unit which we're going to take a look at in a second also has really interesting support when it comes to how you put your your rolls of filament so let's just look at a couple more things and then we'll go back to the AMS so you can see um more about the printer I'm going to go ahead and switch get behind the camera and then we're going to look at the printer closeup now the printer itself I've been running it in our dining room just to test and see how loud the printer is and what we found is that it runs extremely quiet this is something that you can have in an era of your home and it will not bother you there's only one noise that I hear from this and that is a little startup uh almost like a game sound like an old Nintendo or Atari as it starts up and that's something that is the loudest thing and that's something that you can disable but let's take a look at some of the the quality of the prints before we do this uh the rest of the uh review so take a look at this this is coming from the bamboo this is a multicolor print Beni right and you can see it's the quality that you would expect from any one of their printers here is another one and this is a standard one all these printed Ultra Ultra fast and they are doing great when it comes to overall look and quality we did a multi- print then we'll get this guy over here multicolor print we did this uh Panda right and he did really well I didn't remove all of the support material that you see there so there's still some support material there and I ran out of filament so his nose got a little bit cut off but uh that was fine everything worked out and everything works well now the one thing that I found that is just standard when you're dealing with uh any kind of bamboo printer that has AMS is the amount of poop and this is the filament that gets rejected as you're creating these prints now I'm going to show you I'm going to bring on camera I'm taking off some loose pieces this is how much poop this guy right here created there is a lot here this is literally just black and white and gray material that was used to print this guy so the one thing about having anything that is color is that it is going to use up more uh filament and also you're going to have more waist this uh may do better because of how close the filament is to the nozzle at the very top that I showed you when it comes to speed but the filament you know purging is is still going to be a concerned for many if you're going to be using multicolor prints all right we'll go ahead and move these guys over to the side um I did this guy right here too we'll bring this in camera this is really nice uh this is intended to be a light box the uh the other portion in the back I haven't printed it yet but you'll notice print in place multicolor looks great actually love this this uh this print now the belt the bed the bed itself you'll notice here is removable it actually has a wiper area over here comes into place as the printer is printing you'll notice how it will basically clean itself do some uh level testing and then uh start printing um I do wipe this off occasionally with alcohol I've been touching it a lot right now I'll probably do that to make sure that things stick now as we look at the nozzle and let's go ahead and shift for a second now looking at the print head multi- filament input uh and basically it will basically come in here it does have a filament I would say launcher right or catapult basically it will basically extrude here an extra filament kick it out and that's why I have this little tray right here or bin to capture it so I just basically put it here on the side and it kicks it in here and it's not all over the place in addition to that you do have on this side over here the light that we talked about you have your camera you'll notice my label of Kit flash we'll push this back a little bit and it does have an onscreen display and we just uh finished printing a prototype just a couple seconds ago for testing so what we'll do is let's take a look at the display and see all the options you have there now as we look at the top here you can see the temperature of your nozzle temperature of your bed your Wi-Fi your camera we could go into filament here and you can see your single spool if you have a single spool on or your AMS which I have and the ability to load and unload filament you also then have in your control area standard controls nozzle bed uh speed right lights you can turn the light on and off um extruder movement XY all these things are pretty pretty standard right uh you can go into your settings area here you can see again information your firmware your Wi-Fi um any kind of Maintenance that's required you'll be be able to see it there uh your SD you can see again your screen time timeout land mode land mode if you want to do that so it's not going through the cloud um all those good things that you would expect in this area you also then have your AI assistance so there's no messages anything that you have to worry about now the middle of the screen here as you touch it you can come in and you can see your prints now these are all the prints that we've uh printed on it and what I like about it is that they're actually stored so they're actually stored here and I'm going to put this benchi to print in a couple seconds so one of the tips I want to give you also is that if you put in the the tubes and you put them in the wrong order you have to print this little guy right here and that little guy um is going to basically allow you to remove the filament uh tubes really easy that's something that you will need uh here's the bamboo that I printed uh so that or the panda and then you can see some of the other um items that are on here so a lot of detail here when it comes to your prints and what we'll do is just so you can see what the print ex exercise looks like I'm going to go ahead and choose the this Beni here okay and then let's go ahead and hit continue and once you choose your print you're going to get this detail where it should allow you to access different colors if you want to do coloring bed leveling and also Dynamic calibration flows if needed I'm going to hit next and I'm going to hit uh print and I'm going to make sure that I'm going to choose the gray as my print and I'm going to choose print now a couple things will happen as it warms up you can see that it's loading it says uh it's going to give me information as to how much time it thinks it's going to take you can see the that's the kind of Nintendo sound I mention it makes uh you'll see your nozzle temperature bed temperature rising speed or percentage of speed that you have and percentage of your fan your light and then you have play and pause you'll notice that it's recording as well let's take a look at uh and try to capture the actual movement that this is uh doing right here so we'll we'll pull out just so you can see that right there and we'll just watch the startup we'll zoom in a little bit right here so you can see everything that's going to happen so uh the nozzle temperature is going to heat up really quick so right now it's at 158 160 so it has a really decent speed when it comes to nozzle temperature and I really like that uh followed by that then you have your bed temperature is going to go up as well now since we chose gray the very first part of our process and we'll zoom out a little bit so you can see what's going on here uh you're going to see the filament Spool in the back right there is going to rotate which it already did and it fed some filament in so the gray is already being fed there uh we'll see some of that waste coming out and then it's going to kick it um off to the side I don't have my little basket there so it's going to fall on the floor which is not a problem because we'll pick that up and and then deal with that once that happens now it's already kicked off the actual filament off and it had that initial Purge we'll just grab it right here so you can see it there is that initial Purge and now what it's going to do is it's going to clean the head it's going to tap over here a couple times it's going to go ahead and also do its bed leveling just checking things out and then it's going to start to print now as it's going through its checks we're going to highlight some other areas here you have your SD card your micr SD this is your connection for your AMS there is an additional Port right here we don't know what that's going to be used for but one is present there so uh maybe there's some type of expansion that's going to be coming soon you can see how it's going through its process and the initial when it speeds up and it starts off it does get a little bit louder because of just a startup sequence but then once it starts it gets really quiet and it's and it's really difficult to be able to hear it if you're um have home that has a lot of white noise uh you'll notice that you have here your uh power cord that goes from here to the actual print head you have cable that comes into the actual unit itself a little LED that indicates that the unit is on um you do have in the back here a spool for if you're not going to be using the AMS it's one way to go with that spool holder all right so we're off and you can see this is bamboo fast so we're going to let the Beni actually print out you notice that it's going crazy fast it did uh do two purges of filament which I'll bring on camera you can see this is at least the the startup Purge that it did for that right almost quite a bit there and we'll just let it continue to run now while the print is going I'll just highlight a couple things about the AMS uh the AMS uh has a unique mounting or locking mechanism I'm going to move this off right here for a second so you can see you notice that this area right here is where the actual spools will go most of the spools I have fit you might find some spools will not fit but what ends up happening is uh once that goes in it locks in now this as it's basically being pulled in kind of has a spring mechanism so that as it unloads it kind of rotates on itself which I think is pretty cool so I'm going to go ahead and put this one back in just like that right and make sure that that's right there now to load your filament all you're going to do is push this button in load your filament in and it will load it all the way up to the print head nothing else is required now while the printer is still running and we can see there in the background you can see that each one of your positions for your filament is labeled so you have 1 two three and four and you'll notice that this is four this is three and then this is two and then this is one uh you have to make sure that you put these in a specific order so that you have the right length I like having it behind it now one thing that is pretty clear as you look at this is that the actual footprint of this smaller bamboo the A1 Mini seems to be larger than the p1p p1s or even the X1 Carbon because the AMS unit cannot sit on top so make sure that you understand that as you look at getting space now the AMS does have a nice support bracket here and you notice that this basically is just going to hold it up in this area this is again an optional accessory but highly recommended especially if you want to experiment with Color Prints now one other thing I wanted to highlight is that this is actually an official bamboo lab filament that comes in one of their spools it does have a like an NFC uh chip in it so when you put it into the actual printer it recognizes the actual type of material and the color automatically I had I had didn't have to do anything the other ones which are offbrand um some of them are polymaker and this is one is elegu these uh you have to tell the system what you have and I'm just using polymaker pla settings for all of them all right so here's another view of the AMS and you can see how it's rotating uh to provide filament for the Beni that we're Printing and then you can see everything that's going on it does Shake quite a bit as it's moving so that's going to be something that you should take into consideration as you determine the position for this printer everything here is happening in real time so I haven't really stopped the video and the amount of time that's transpired is around few minutes it's 55% and my recording is going on now for 13 minutes so you can see how fast this printer is printing right and you may be able to hear the noise the loudest part of this printer is going to be the fan now this is one of the parts that we've printed off on the A1 Mini and I just want to show you the overall quality of this print uh this is a jig that's used for laser engraving and you can see what this bottom layer looks like and this is again coming from the A1 now here's one coming from the p1s crazy isn't it side by side back almost identical oh yeah identical now the X1 mini is a great printer for those of you who are looking to get into printing for the first time and would like to have a fantastic color solution like this which in my opinion there are other Solutions out on the market but none that actually can create the kind of quality of print that you can with the bamboo lab printer line of printers and do it at the price point that we're looking at right here if you're a beginner or if you're not a beginner and just looking for something for rapid prototyping like I am this printer is going to meet that need it is also one of the most affordable printers for the quality that you're getting with this color solution that we're seeing here that you can find on the market as well so want to thank bamboo lab for sending us this printer for review to check it out on our Channel and to experience something so unique small but powerful if you have any comments or questions let us know see you in the next video

Channel: EBPMAN Tech Reviews

Views: 10,511

Keywords: ebpman, bambu lab a1, bambu lab a1 mini, bambu lab a1 benchy, bambu lab a1 mini review, bambu lab a1 mini benchy, bambu lab a1 mini vs p1s, bambu lab a1 mini ams, bambu lab a1 test, bambu lab a1 vs p1p, bambu lab a1 mini unboxing, bambu lab a1 mini combo, bambu lab a1 multicolor, bambulab a1 speed, 3d printer projects, bambu lab ams, 3d printer, a1 mini, bambu a1 mini, bambu lab, bambu a1, bambulab a1, bambu lab x1 carbon, bambulab a1 mini, a1 mini bambu, bambu p1s

Id: Y-CJj3T39hQ

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2023