My New A1 Printer

[JKnightandKARR]

But like I said, you made your decision and it seems to be a good one. I guess that I was just hoping to see a bit into your decision making.

I thought about it for a few days. Contenders was:
-Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro- Main diff is Plus little bigger print size vs Pro
-Elegoo Naptune 4 Plus- Little cheaper.
-Elegoo Centauri Carbon- Heard encloaed cases make some stuff like ABS easier.

It was little hard, almost just got N4 Pro, but got to thinking that the enclosed space, wanna try selling stuff, so in the end the CC won. Honestly, probly wouldn't have been bad in any case, but the CC is just BadA$$ as far as printers go. Doing first print of my choosing right now. 8hrs for most of the Hilt n hand grip for the Master Sword from the Lwgend of Zelda.

[granz]

Got it, thanks for the background to your decision. Any ideas of how you want to do the commercial printing? I also need to find some ways to increase my income.

[granz]

Well, I had my first bad power outage that killed a print job. Last night, at about 10:30, while my printer was reprinting that job for my friend, our power went out. It was out for about five hours, but right after the power went out, I shut down the printer - in case of multiple bumps when power was being restored.

This morning, when I came into my office, I plugged the printer back in, and powered it up. It responded with a message that it had lost power, and that I could attempt to continue the print. I told it to continue, and the print seems to be going well.

This is the third attempt to print this job. The first one gave that bad stringing on the "shelf" - the one with no supports. On the second print, I added the supports, and had it set to "tree" supports. The shelf printed, but it took a lot of effort to remove the supports, and it looks pretty cruddy. This third print has the supports turned on, and set to "normal." I see a lot of tiny supports, and it does not look like it will be much (if any) better than the "tree" supports.

When I first load the file, it shows the object standing up, but when I click on auto-orient it lays the object on it's side - which actually looks right, except for that shelf. If this print job does not look decent, I will give it one more try, with the item standing up, as it comes in from the file. I will then give my friend the one that looks best.

[granz]

Well, here is the print job. It is a gift to a good friend of mine, and his wife. Don is the worship leader at our Church, and he is a professor of trumpet. He met his wife at a music event, both of them (actually their kids too) are musically inclined.

This is a Treble Clef, and a Bass Clef - used to indicate which notes are represented by the lines and spaces on a musical staff.

Don's wife was born, and raised, in the Czech Republic, and has been living there for the past year waiting for him to join her. Things have not gone as expected, though, and so she has come back to visit with him. I will give one to him, and one to her, and remind them that good music requires both to be together - and that they should remember that they should both be together (I'll need to work on the wording. )

[Chris Savage]

This is a Treble Clef, and a Bass Clef

Or...a Bass Clef and a Treble Clef, respectively. 

[JKnightandKARR]

Got it, thanks for the background to your decision. Any ideas of how you want to do the commercial printing? I also need to find some ways to increase my income.

I know first i gotta arange stuff n get more filsment n resin. Power loss feature is nice ain't it?

[granz]

This is a Treble Clef, and a Bass Clef

Or...a Bass Clef and a Treble Clef, respectively. 

True... I told them to line up correctly. Just like kids, they never listen.  

[JKnightandKARR]

Well, here is the print job. It is a gift to a good friend of mine, and his wife. Don is the worship leader at our Church, and he is a professor of trumpet. He met his wife at a music event, both of them (actually their kids too) are musically inclined.

This is a Treble Clef, and a Bass Clef - used to indicate which notes are represented by the lines and spaces on a musical staff.

Don's wife was born, and raised, in the Czech Republic, and has been living there for the past year waiting for him to join her. Things have not gone as expected, though, and so she has come back to visit with him. I will give one to him, and one to her, and remind them that good music requires both to be together - and that they should remember that they should both be together (I'll need to work on the wording. )

Nice idea.

[granz]

My first real trouble: the TF Card interface is giving trouble.

It started out by the printer giving a read/write error when trying to send a large print (15 different small items) from BambuStudio. It is not constant, so sometimes I can print, and other times it won't even try. One time it started the print, and only got a couple layers down before it quit.

In my searching for how to fix this, I came across a few things to try. First, I did get a brand new TF Card, and format it as FAT-32 on my computer. This seems to have had no change - I think that I got one, or two, prints to work. Some people said that the card needs to be formatted in the printer, but the format never gets going (my printer is currently at 0% of a format started last night - about ten hours,) and I have tried about three, or four, format jobs.

I have had equal successes, and failures, from both cards.

Secondly, some people have recommended a complete shutdown, but that doesn't change the troubles for me, even having tried several times.

The last thing suggested is that they have gotten a new control board from Bambu Lab, and that seemed to take care of the troubles.

@Chris Savage, have you (or anyone else) had (or heard of) anything like this? Any ideas?

[Chris Savage]

@Chris Savage, have you (or anyone else) had (or heard of) anything like this? Any ideas?

I never had any such issues or they would have been in my review. In fact, I am a bit embarrassed...I had to look up what a TF card was. I had only known them as SD Cards.

[granz]

Yeah, I normally call them SD Cards, but thought that I should be as accurate as possible when describing a trouble.

So, more research showed me that another possibility is low-quality cards. Bambu Lab gives a generic card with their printers, and some of them, apparently, are pretty poor.

In looking for another card, I wanted a good, name-brand card. Bambu Lab recommended an actual SanDisk (apparently, there are some fakes being sold as true SanDisks,) so that is what I looked for. It's pretty sad that a company like Bambu Lab would damage their own reputation by cheaping out on their included cards - shooting themselves in the foot.

There are different speed ratings for SD Cards, and most of them that I saw are Class 4. Because these printers do not have any internal memory (another area where Bambu Lab could improve their products,) they use the card for all files downloaded to the printer. One Class 10, 32GB card is now on order, and I paid the extra $3 for delivery before 8:00AM tomorrow. Hopefully, that will take care of my issues.

Related to Bambu Lab's printers, there is an article from Call-3D describing this trouble:

Updated firmware often places higher demands on the micro SD card—such as faster read/write speeds or more stable data transmission—and the stock card struggles to keep up. Over time, this strain can lead to card damage, directly causing the card error.

The good news? Most users have found that resolving the error is simpler than expected: switching to a high-quality, reputable third-party micro SD card often eliminates the SD card error entirely. This straightforward fix gets your printer back to normal printing operations in no time.

As I have recently purchased my A1, it probably has the updated firmware. The article also recommends that I keep another good-quality card, and use it if I get any more errors - so the author seems to think that even a good card could have troubles. Maybe, Bambu Lab should have put a different storage inside their printers.

So, this seems to confirm my suspicions. As I said, hopefully this will fix my troubles. I will let you guys know if I get any more troubles. And, if not, then I will write up a post for Joe's Tip Thread.