Here’s how Bambu will fix its 3D printers that began printing by themselves

On Wednesday, some Bambu users woke to find that their 3D printers had created new unwanted prints overnight — without any prompts or supervision by users. The prints damaged some devices, and also caused concern about fire risks. Bambu traced the issue back to a cloud server outage — specifically, they sent extra MQTT commands when they shouldn’t have and without checking there wasn’t already a print on the bed.

For Bambu’s flagship lidar-equipped X1C printer, it’s rolling out a firmware feature that will verify whether a printed model has been removed from the plate before each print. If the printer finds an issue, it will ask you for confirmation through a message on the device’s screen as well as on its Bambu Studio and Bambu Handy software.

Meanwhile, Bambu’s P1 series printers, which don’t have a lidar sensor, will show reminders that ask you to clean the plate before starting a print. You’ll have to confirm that the plate is clean before the device will start printing. While Bambu will enable both of these verification processes by default, it says you can disable them from the printer’s settings menu.

Bambu also introduces a feature which constantly monitors temperature of the heatbed and hotend. The 3D printer’s screen — and its accompanying software — will display error messages if it detects hotter than normal temperatures. Bambu printers will now check the timestamp on each print request, and delete any older ones.

While Bambu already pushed an update to its cloud server with that last feature, the other firmware fixes aren’t coming just yet, and it doesn’t seem like Bambu has an estimated timeframe beyond making them top priority:

We will need time to make all the changes that we have mentioned in this release. This is to ensure quality and reliability for software updates, and also to be able bring you new features on which we are currently working.

These updates were on our list, but safety and security concerns were discovered that moved them to the top. We will work hard to get these features out as soon as possible.

Bambu, despite this, has responded to the issue in a remarkably quick manner and is doing its best to compensate customers. Bambu admitted responsibility in just three days. They also promised repairs and provided detailed fixes.

The company says that anyone who had their device damaged during the cloud outage “will receive assistance to repair the printers” and also committed to providing spare parts and spools of filament to make up for any materials wasted when printers went rogue. It encourages users who are affected to contact their support team and submit logs from their printer.