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

On Wednesday, some Bambu users woke up to find that their 3D printers had created unwanted new prints overnight, without prompting or supervision from users. Those prints not only damaged some devices when they tried to print a second design on top of the ones they already printed, but also raised concerns about potential fire hazards. Bambu traced the issue to a cloud server outage; specifically, they sent additional MQTT commands when they shouldn’t have and without verifying that there was no longer a footprint in the bed.

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

Meanwhile, Bambu’s P1 series printers, which don’t have a lidar sensor, will display reminders asking you to clean the board before starting a print. You will need to confirm that the platen is clean before the device starts printing. While Bambu will enable both verification processes by default, it says that 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 display, and accompanying software, will display error messages if it detects higher than normal temperatures. Bambu will start making printers automatically check the timestamp of each print request and also discard outdated ones.

While Bambu has already pushed an update to its cloud server with that latest feature, the other firmware fixes are yet to arrive, and it doesn’t seem like Bambu has an estimated time frame beyond making them top priority:

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

Some of these updates were already on our list of features to work on, but security issues were discovered that moved these features to the top of our priority list. Our team will do our best to deliver these new features in the shortest possible time.

Despite this, Bambu has responded to this issue remarkably quickly and is working to compensate customers. In just three days, Bambu admitted full responsibility for him, investigated, promised repairs, and detailed exact solutions.

The company says that anyone who suffered damage to their device during the cloud outage “will receive assistance to repair the printers” and has also promised to provide spare parts and spools of filament to make up for materials wasted when the printers failed. It advises affected users to contact their support team and provide printer logs.