H2C Is On The Way: Here’s How It All Started
blog.bambulab.com
I hope you’re as excited as we are about the launch of H2S. After all, H2S is more like the product everyone has been asking for over the past three years; essentially a bigger X1C. But this launch also brings us a tough question: should we let everyone know

Seems like Bambu Lab has a new trick for reducing waste. Rather than a toolchanger like the Prusa XL or the Snapmaker, they’re swapping just the nozzle. As far as I can tell from the video, the printer still has a second nozzle which won’t swap in and out, meaning a print can be run with 7 nozzles (six from the Vortek system, plus the second nozzle in the toolhead). So if you’re using 7 or fewer filaments, no pooping is necessary.

The cool bit here is that they’re using wireless chips in the nozzles to communicate the thermistor data to the printer, so no pin-based connections are needed.

Pretty cool solution, I think. I assume you’d still need a prime tower, but that’s a small amount of waste if they’re eliminating poop from purging the nozzles.

I’m curious to see how they’ll handle calibration, surely the nozzles aren’t all going to be perfectly aligned all the time.

  • kurushimi@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    Yep, for me my first printer was a Prusa MK3S+. At the time it was definitely the sort of experience you just described, and I jumped on the Prusa Enclosure upgrade to enable ABS. But there were some maintenance frustrations nevertheless that prompted me to get a backup printer.

    I went with an Ender 3 V2, and my god that gave me the whole “literally doesn’t work out of the box, buy this mandatory set of aftermarket upgrades and enjoy your continuous maintenance trap” experience.

    Never again. I sold that and grabbed an X1C which became my main printer with the Prusa as the backup.

    I totally appreciate the value of open source; Linux built my career and I’ve lived and breathed it and the OSS community for the better part of two decades. I also totally appreciate and respect folks who take joy in tinkering with and maintaining their hardware. I’m just not that guy anymore and I’ve transitioned into the “wanting things to just work” phase for most things.

    To me, if we can have both closed source options and open source options competing and each surviving — to me similar to say MacOS and Linux — then everyone can benefit; there’s a solution for everyone.