 The Bamboo Lab A1 Mini was a big hit, but not a very big printer, but it's time to change that. This is the brand new Bamboo Lab A1 and it's not many anymore. My name's Jim and this is the Edge of Tech. Bamboo Lab just released the A1 and I've had it for a few weeks. Spoiler alert, it's awesome. Let's take a look at why it's one of the best 3D printers on the market now, especially for beginners. Once I got the machine unboxed, the setup was actually pretty easy. It took maybe like 15 to 20 minutes total and if you're a beginner, I've never done that before, that's probably a pretty fair timeline. I'm not going to show the assembly here, but I will have a dedicated video coming soon, if you want to follow along and learn how this thing gets set up. All you really need to know right now is that it's actually pretty easy and fast to set up. It includes everything you need in the box, including a single spool holder, if you choose to use a single spool holder. This would come handy if you don't have the AMS, you'd actually install this. It comes with a little tiny bit of filament and I hate to see this. I want to see a full-size roll or at least a half a roll come with these things. I do not like to see this little piece of filament here. Bamboo Lab, if you're listening, please don't be like everybody else and do this. It comes with your filament swatches. This shows you the different types of filaments and the colors they offer. I don't think this is all of them right now, but this is a lot of them and it gives you a really good idea inside what colors look like when you're going to order the Bamboo Lab filament. We'll talk more about that later. Power cord, of course. It comes with an extra PTFE tube here. Actually, this one will be used if you're going to do a single spool, so we need that. We're going to set that all there. And then, of course, a toolkit here when you open this. This is where all your screws and everything are stored. And when you pop that open, all of your screws are in here in individually wrapped bags, which is great. A little bit of grease down there. You have lubricant oil here. An extra separator for your PTFE tubes and your wires. An extra nozzle wiper. Some Allen wrenches that are actually like T-handles, which is great to see. A nozzle unclogger is hiding in here. Like I said, this is all your screws that you're going to need. And a razor here if you want to print the awesome razor knife. And that's pretty much what all comes in the box with the exception of the printer. So the A1 actually has a 256x256x256 square build area. And that's the same as we see on all their other printers except for the A1 Mini. In freedom units, that's about 10 inch squared. A three and a half inch IPS touchscreen controls the whole machine. As you can see here, it's very responsive and allows me to move to the menus. It makes selections pretty easy. Actually, I really like this touchscreen. The hot end comes with a point for quick change nozzle. And it's actually crazy easy to replace just like the A1 Mini was. All you have to do is pull the front cover off, take your silicone sock off, unclip and pull the nozzle out. When you're ready to put it back together, put the new nozzle in, clip it, put the silicone sock on and put the front cover back on. And you're done. That's it. They say you can do it in about 30 seconds. And with some practice, that's definitely not far from the truth. But I think a minute is pretty reasonable. It's super easy to swap between nozzles. So far I've talked about some of the features of the A1, but I haven't even come close to talking about the coolest ones. This printer pretty much does everything for you. When you first run the setup on this, it goes through a noise cancellation process, which sweeps through frequencies of the stepper motors and really quiets this thing down. It's actually very quiet to run. Then before every single print, it runs a vibration calibration. Most printers do this one time and then you're good to go. But the A1 actually does it before every single print. And that will account for the belt tension before every print and the temperature in the room, stuff like that, to make sure that you get the best prints possible and that this thing can keep up with the speed and accuracy that Bamboo Labs says it has. The A1, just like the A1 Mini, has that eddy current sensor built into the hotend as well. What that does is it actually measures the pressure of the hotend while your filament is flowing through and that allows the machine to adjust the flow rate in real time to keep this thing as accurate as possible while the machine is running. In printers past, you'd have to go in, measure your flow rate, dial it in, and then pump it into either your slicer or the G-code or the firmware of the machine and then it's set. You're done until you change it again. On this machine, it does it for you while it's printing and that's pretty cool. It also has a filament runout sensor built in and Bamboo Lab claims that it has the most advanced filament monitoring system on the 3D printers right now. It actually measures the existence of the filament, the speed at which the filament is traveling, the odometry so it measures how much filament has come through. It measures the tension above the extruder and the pressure underneath the extruder at the hotend. All of that comes together for one heck of a filament monitoring system that pretty much tells you everything you need to know on the hotend and if there's any issues, it actually alerts you that there's issues. The A1 runs on linear rails and that really helps the printer run smoother and more accurate. Another great thing about linear rails is that it's very low maintenance compared to like v-wheels in an extrusion where you have to adjust the v-wheels and get the right tension and all of that stuff. You don't have to do that with a machine like this. Linear rails are just in my opinion much easier than the v-wheels because you don't have to guess about the tension and if one wheel is too loose and too tight and all that, it is just there and rides on the bearing and it's ready to go. So all of that combined means that this printer can move fast. They say it can run at 500 millimeters a second with a top acceleration of 10,000 millimeters a second squared. In Lehmann's terms, that's fast. It is slower compared to like the X1 carbon because that's a core XY, it's not flinging the bed all over but this thing is very fast for a bed slinger like this. On top of the speed and accuracy of the A1, you can actually get it with the AMS light as you see here. This is the automatic material system and it allows up to four different colors to do multi-color printing or if you're somebody that just does a lot of printing, you can load up the same colors and have it fail over. So if slot one ran out, it would go to slot two with the same color in it and just keep printing, stuff like that. Well, Bamboo Lab has done an amazing job with multi-color printing built right out of the box on their 3D printers and the A1 here, it does not disappoint. Real quick, if you're getting value from today's video, please consider smashing that like button and if you want to see more videos about 3D printing lasers and hopefully some more CNC, hit that subscribe button. We are so close to 100,000 subscribers and I really appreciate each and every one of you. Thank you guys so much for being here. I couldn't thank you more for watching the channel and now back to it. Bamboo Lab provides Bamboo Studio as the slicer or the program that takes the 3D models and makes them work with the 3D printer. In my opinion, it is one of the best slicers that you can get, especially with one of these machines out of the box. It is based on Prusa Slicer, so credit there, but it is, it's just plain awesome to use. You can monitor your printer right in the slicer, you can change settings live while it's printing, do whatever you want right from the slicer and because this has a camera, you can actually monitor it right from your desktop in the slicer itself. Admittedly, this is not the best camera and I think that is one of the things that I don't like the most about this machine. I would love to see these somehow come with the camera that's on the X1 series, which is awesome, it's just a way better camera. This does the job, you can check in, you can see what you're doing, but it's choppy and it's just not the best. On top of that, the slicer integrates with Makerworld. Makerworld is this awesome place where you can jump in, find models that other users have submitted and send them straight to your printer with no slicing or anything. All you have to do is choose a model, select print, choose your printer and shoot it over. It is literally that easy and if you're getting started into 3D printing, this is the fastest way to send something that you haven't sliced yet, if you haven't learned that to your printer and just get printing. It's super easy. But wait, it gets better. If you have an Android or iPhone, you can do almost all of the same things right from their Bamboo Handy app. I use this daily to check in on prints I have going with all of my printers and it's just crazy handy to be able to pop in, look at your printer, see how it's going, that kind of thing. And then also, I might be out and about and think, you know, I really need another fidget toy. I'm going to jump in to Bamboo Handy, find a fidget toy I want and send it over to one of my printers. It's just, it makes life so much easier when you have a really good app on your phone and most people are using Android or Apple so it should benefit you as well. All that being said, you do have to be connected to a network for that stuff to work. Now there's two ways you can do that, you can connect it to anything, you can do it anywhere in the world. I could be in New York and send prints straight over to this or you can actually use it just on a local network where it doesn't leave your building, you can set up a private Wi-Fi network and then just use it all inside of there if you prefer. So there is multiple ways to use this printer, SD card, network, private network, that kind of thing. Now that we know a little more about how this printer works and what makes it tick, we should check out some of the 3D prints that have come off of it. Everything I'm showing today has been printed in the Bamboo Lab PLA which is distributed by Bamboo Lab and has some really cool features. For one, it's actually really reasonable priced but for two, it comes with reusable spools. When you're done and you're empty, you just pop it open, dump off the cardboard interior which has RFID trackers on them. Those RFID trackers actually allow the machine to detect what filament is in it and all of their spools have that which is awesome. When you order a refill, you actually get new RFID trackers so you don't have to worry about if the spool can only use PLA or something. You can put PETG on there and this RFID tracker will tell the machine that's what it is. So it's really cool if you're in their ecosystem because you get reusable spools. When you're done, you drop your new filament in the center, you tighten up the spool, you throw it on and you're good to go. So it's awesome that Bamboo Lab has thought ahead and uses reusable spools that integrates with the rest of their products in kind of one big ecosystem. The first thing that I print on all of my Bamboo Lab printers is a Benchy. This Benchy had a print time of just about 14 minutes total, not including the calibration which is a pretty fast Benchy considering that I'm used to seeing one and a half to two hour Benchies that don't come out near as good as this. I'll definitely take 14 minutes on this one. Next I have the clock spring transposition tank and it prints in two separate pieces. This all prints in place and it has some really cool movement in the lid. I love how this looks and when you put it together it actually spins these little gears through the threads and turns the hole inside like that. This thing came out very good. Sven is an evil genius over at clock spring and if you haven't checked him out yet I highly suggest you do because his stuff is just, it's just off the chart. It's super cheap on Patreon and you get so many really awesome models from Sven. The next thing I printed was this and it came straight from Makerworld like we talked about earlier. I found the model and what this does is it holds the color swatches. Yes, color swatches that you get in the box. This is almost all the colors in almost all the materials that they offer as far as bamboo lab filaments. I think this is a really cool idea because it gives you an idea of what each of the colors is. I don't believe that this is all of them but it's always adding and you can actually print them yourself I believe when you get new colors that they add but this actually allows you to organize them so if you want to make a little file system and be able to see them very quickly you can throw them right on here they clip in and you're good to go. I think I'm going to start displaying mine like this I'm going to print a few more of these. Future Jim here I had a failure on a segment I was going to record on the AMS because I screwed up the colors on this really sweet hue forge print. If you haven't checked out hue forge I'll put a link in the description below but bamboo lab is actually going to be releasing some filament packs in conjunction or working with hue forge and what hue forge is is amazing you can kind of see on this picture here we got a really good scene here with a reflection down here I just messed the colors up on this one so I'm going to redo it or I'm going to show you some b-roll during this segment of another hue forge print that I did just to kind of show you the power of the AMS here the multi-color printing is absolutely awesome hue forge is amazing if you haven't checked out hue forge you have to check that out again there's a link in the description below and also I'll put the link in the description below for the hue forge filament packs that just are getting released or just been released by the time this video comes out but this is a really cool sign that I did for my wife it says attention tiny printing underway and I used the sign maker that is right inside of Makerworld so I just went in there there's a sign maker you choose your shape you choose the words and the rest is history it's pretty awesome so this is one of those signs this shows you kind of the multi-color print it's orange on the back and this is just a two-color print all of this looks great but let's talk about the price the A1 alone is going for $399 that's only $399 for this monster machine alone and if you want to add the four-color AMS combo you can get it for $559 I really think they killed it with those prices because it's hard to get a machine that's this technologically advanced that gets as good as these prints do with four-color multi-color printing for $559 so I really think that's a great deal it's no surprise that I'm a bamboo lab fanboy but I got to call out a good deal when I see it and this is definitely one now look it is no surprise that bamboo lab competes with pretty much every other 3d printing manufacturer out there because that's what they do but they mostly get compared to the Prusa machines and to be honest I don't think that's a fair fight the A1 machines are are smarter they're faster they're quieter they're easier to use they come almost pre-built right out of the box and overall they're just a better value and much cheaper for example if you look at a pre-built MK4 right now on the Prusa website it is $1,099 before shipping your tax and all the other stuff this is $399 that's apples to apples just machine no AMS if you want to look at building your own MK4 which is awesome and many people have done it I built a bunch of 3d printers and I have not done an MK3s or an MK3 or an MK4 but I've built a bunch of kits and I really enjoy that so if you want to do that that is $799 and you have to put it all together so let me put it like this as an example for one Prusa MK4 at $1,099 you could almost get three three A1s or you can get two of them with four color multi-color printing with the AMS here two and they come pre-built ready to go in minutes right out of the box that is just something that's really hard to overlook in my opinion strictly my opinion I think the A1 is a better machine I love the Prusa machines I love what they do for the community I love their upgrade paths and it's awesome but this is a better value so overall you probably see that I really like this machine and that's true it makes it very easy to add this to my list of best 3d printers for a new person getting into 3d printing the whole ecosystem is just so easy to use and you can get printing in minutes out of the box with this if you're not new to 3d printing and you're ready for something that just works this is the printer for you as well it just works right out of the box much like all of the other bamboo lab printers I understand that some of them are going to have issues and support helps you fix them but every printer is going to have an issue but right out of the box ease of use this thing is awesome now I have to say I do still think I like my X1 carbons the best I just love how those things run I love the Core XY platform and they're just a little faster than this but this is definitely going in my bamboo lab print farm and it's going to help crank out any projects I want to throw at it pretty much any time I want as long as I keep filament loaded if you're interested in the A1 or the A1 combo or those hue forge packs all of those links will be in the description below it's an affiliate link it helps out the channel and I really appreciate that you use it so click that link and grab yourself one if you're ready to do so and you want a printer like this just know that there are affiliate links and I really appreciate your help because it helps out the channel every time you guys click one of those also if you made it this far you rock you're a rock star and don't forget to check out that video right there