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. Not only did those prints damage some devices when they attempted to print a second design atop ones they already printed out but it also raised concerns about potential 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.

To address concerns about fire risks, Bambu is also introducing a feature that constantly monitors the temperature of the hotend and heat bed. The 3D printer’s screen — and its accompanying software — will display error messages if it detects hotter than normal temperatures. Bambu will start having printers automatically check the timestamp of each print request and discard any outdated ones as well.

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:

As you might know, to ensure the quality and reliability of software updates and to also be able to bring you other new features we are working on, we will need some time to do all the changes we mentioned in this update.

Some of these updates were already on our list of features to work on, but security and safety concerns discovered moved these features to the top of our list of priorities. Our team will do their best to deliver these new functions in the shortest amount of time possible

Despite this, Bambu has responded to this issue remarkably fast and is working to make it up to customers. In just three days, Bambu has admitted full responsibility, investigated, promised repairs, and detailed exact 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 advises impacted users to contact its support team and provide logs from the printer.