During COVID, I used my stimulus money to purchase a Creality CR-6 SE and jump into the 3D printing world. As with all things that I purchase, I had done quite a bit of research on what I should buy and ultimately decided that for the money I was willing to invest in this new toy, this printer would satisfy my desires.

That was four years ago. I got a lot of enjoyment out of my CR-6, at least until I started having difficulties with bed leveling and the the hotend had issues (the hotend is what the melted filament runs out of to print and create the things). I also created a touchscreen interface for the CR-6, printed an articulated arm to hold a camera so I could use Octoprint and Spaghetti Detective to help catch bad prints off the rip. I had a lot of fun with both the printer and the tech accessories I created to work with the printer. The problems with the printer, though, ended up being very discouraging. I bought some parts and fixed it, but it was never quite the same and the prints were never as good as I thought they should be. It didn’t help that I’m a computer nerd, not an engineer, so some of the technicalities were just out of my wheelhouse enough to cause me a fair amount of frustration.

Enter the Bambu P1S. After much consideration, recommendations, and research, I decided to purchase the Bambu P1S in February. This printer is incredible right out of the box. In addition to having an AMS system paired with it (Automatic Material System, the ability to print multiple color filaments; for the bundle cost), I’ve not changed a single setting on the printer yet and have printed so many things at this point. In fact, in just over a week, I think the printer was not printing only when it was waiting on a human to take the print off the print bed (a problem that I might be compelled to solve in the nearish future).

It is remarkable how much consumer 3D printing has improved over the last four years. While this printer did cost more than the original Creality I had purchased, that was mostly due to the AMS system that I purchased as a bundle, but that gives the functionality of printing multiple colors/filaments during a project print. This has already come in handy as I’ve printed objects that previously I’d have had to simply print single color. Speaking of handy, the Bambu ecosystem comes with a mobile app called Handy that lets you search MarkerWorld, slice, print, stream video, and work with your printer settings, all directly from the mobile phone app. Only once have I actually sliced and printed from my computer, which is a stark difference from before since I would have to download and slice the files and then sneaker-net (walk them) back to the machine to print.

Below are some pictures of prints thus far (by far not all of the prints I’ve completed, as I’ve not taken a photo of all of them), so you can get an idea of what I’ve had going on. These are some examples. I’ve also solved some problems around the house by creating hooks to hold items , including cables, and various other things. I’ve created gifts and gift boxes. I’ll have to get better at photographing completed prints and will share some others moving forward.