The Saga of Hacking a Bambu X1 Carbon
Bambu Labs make indisputably excellent printers. However, that excellence comes at the cost of freedom. After a firmware release earlier this year, Bambu printers could only work with Bambu’s own slicer. For [Proper Printing], this was unacceptable, so printer modification was in order.
First on the plate was the pesky Bambu Labs nozzle. They are a pain to replace, and specialty sizes like 1.8mm are nonexistent. To remedy this flaw, a Bambu Labs compatible heat sink, an E3D V6 ring heater, and a heat break assembly are required. The ring heater was needed for clearance with the stock Bambu shroud. With the help of a 3D-printed jig, fresh holes were cut and tapped into the heat sink to make room for the E3D heat break. Some crimping to salvaged connectors and a bit of filing on the heat sink for wire routing, and Bob’s your uncle!
But this was just the tip of the iceberg. To complete this project, the entire printer needed to run on FOSS firmware. To that end, a fan was sacrificed to mount a Big Tree Tech control board. Most everything ended up connecting to the new board without issue, except for the extruder. The X1’s extruder runs over some kind of communication protocol, presumably CAN bus. So instead, [Proper Printing] made a custom mount for the ubiquitous Orbiter extruder. The whole project was nicely tied up with a custom-made screen mount.
After much debugging, the printer does, in fact, live and print. The parts it creates are OK at best, especially considering the effort put into the printer. But there are other ways of printer liberation, so if you have an X1 Carbon in need of hacking, make sure to check out [Joshua Wise’s] journey to custom X1 firmware!
youtube.com/embed/z6Solk2XQcY?…
hackaday.com/2025/09/07/the-sa…
