This Expansion Board Takes Your Bambu Lab X1 3D Printer to the Next Level

The Bambu Lab X1-Carbon is a very good 3D printer and takes a huge amount of the credit for launching Bambu Lab into the top tier of the consumer 3D printing industry. But the X1-Carbon is a couple of years old now and its weaknesses are well-known within the community. The most obvious of those is the proprietary design and ecosystem, which limits what users can do to solve the other problems. Fortunately, there is custom open source firmware available called X1Plus and this X1Plus Expansion Board will help you make the most of it.

X1Plus is firmware that can replace the proprietary firmware that comes installed on Bambu Lab X1-series 3D printers, including the X1-Carbon. Right out of the box, it has some interesting features, like calibration tools and assignable hardware buttons. But the real draw is that X1Plus is open source. That makes it perfect for people who like Bambu Lab’s hardware, but don’t want to be restricted by the proprietary firmware and software. As the wiki says, “X1Plus is to your printer what jailbreaking is to a smartphone.”

But as great as that is, the potential is limited to the hardware available. The X1Plus Expansion Board dramatically expands that, giving users the ability to add new cameras, sensors, networking connectivity, lights, and more to their printers.

The X1Plus Expansion Board connects to a Bambu Lab X1’s control board and tucks behind the touchscreen in an unobtrusive 3D-printed enclosure. It provides USB-A 2.0 ports, a 10/100Mbps Ethernet port, four special GPIO expansion connectors, and one 3.3V STEMMA-QT/Qwiic I2C connector. Onboard regulators take the 24V from the printer and drop it down to 5V and 3.3V for those connectors.

It is possible to use those ports and connectors directly, such as for a USB webcam or a LAN connection, but there are also add-on boards planned. One exciting example is the camera shutter release trigger board. That has two 3.5mm TRS jacks that can tell external mirrorless or DSLR cameras to snap photos. The X1’s chamber camera is lackluster and this add-on board makes it easy to capture high-quality timelapses of prints. Users will also be free to design their own add-on boards to enable whatever functionality they like.

Like the X1Plus firmware, the X1Plus Expansion board is open source. The PCB files are available on GitHub right now if you want to make your own board. But it seems that a campaign to sell assembled boards will launch soon on Crowd Supply, so subscribe for updates there if you’re interested.