Conversation with Bambu Lab R1 Product Manager: When Everyone Participates in Creation
Everyone participating in creation — this is a grand yet somewhat distant dream. In a sense, it is also the ultimate state pursued by maker tools.
For handmade creativity enthusiasts, the present is the golden age of creation. By the end of 2025, creative goods platform Etsy had around 5.6 million active sellers, ranging from hobbyists who sell their works occasionally to professional merchants that make a living from the business. The consumer market is also booming: the proportion of household users of 3D printers in China has climbed from less than 20% in 2023 to 45% in 2025.
The first step to realizing the dream is to "create" the tools for creation
On Kickstarter, there is an endless stream of crowdfunding projects for maker tools, ranging from 3D printers, laser engravers, laser welders and UV printers to CNC machines, covering additive manufacturing, subtractive manufacturing and inkjet printing technologies. These industrial technologies that originated in the last century may seem old and outdated, but they have been iterated by generations of engineers, and discovered and tapped by Chinese entrepreneurs. Maker tools are no longer toys for a small group of people, and all such tools are designed to make creativity realization much easier.
In today's hardware industry, "creation" is apparently a magnificent fantasy. Diligent Chinese entrepreneurs have already covered almost all possible fields in hardware, and the "iPhone moment" seems far out of reach. Most of the time, they work as ascetics, identifying and solving problems, iterating products continuously, where there is no optimal solution, only a better one.
There is no doubt that hardware development is a tough job.
However, NIU Wei, product manager of Bambu Lab R1, can still feel the joy of "creation". For example, to solve the auto light alignment problem, the team developed the sensor completely in-house. When multiple sets of electrical signals from the sensor kept aligning with the laser position, everyone felt that "all the hard work paid off".
Of course, he also had to bear the pain of "creation". When the leading vibration compensation technology of Bambu Lab that had achieved great success on 3D printers failed to be smoothly "replicated" on the R1, they spent half a year iterating a new solution every week. Big problems covered small ones, and new problems kept emerging, so the whole company was mobilized to tackle the key technical difficulties.
Bambu Lab R1
On September 22, Bambu Lab released the R1 equipped with a CO₂ light source. The laser is no longer just an optional module on 3D printers, but has become an independent product.
This is a product that has to withstand both expectations and doubts, as it marks Bambu Lab's first extension of its "creation" boundary to products outside the 3D printing sector.
Laser equipment is not a brand-new category, which has a long history in the industrial field with a large number of relevant enterprises. In the consumer-grade sector, according to xTool's prospectus, in the first nine months of 2025, it has occupied 47% of the global market share of desktop laser engraving and cutting equipment in terms of GTV.
At the end of last year, Bambu Lab responded to the question of whether it would develop products beyond 3D printing. TAO Ye, the founder, answered very restrainedly in an interview with LatePost: "You do this to satisfy users, not to satisfy some of your own assumptions."
Additive manufacturing and subtractive manufacturing seem to be completely opposite technical logics, but when placed on the user's desk, they are just maker tools that meet different steps of creation.
So, will the R1 bring the product methodology that Bambu Lab has verified in the 3D printing market, or will it find that laser processing requires a completely different set of solutions?
The answer is both.
1. Starting from an unsolved pain point
As a veteran who once participated in the R&D of H2D laser, NIU Wei was full of confidence when he joined the R1 project team, even though nearly half of the team members were new hires and campus recruits.
After all, just like what Bambu Lab did when it first started to develop 3D printers, they are good at discovering users' "pain points".
After sorting out all kinds of machines that users have seen or not seen, they found a very prominent but unsolved problem in CO₂ laser cutting equipment — light alignment.
CO₂ laser can cut a wide range of materials, including wood, paper, leather, fabric and acrylic, and it is a common solution for non-metal cutting and engraving.
However, the light alignment step has stumped many new users.
CO₂ laser adopts the spatial light guide scheme: the laser tube is fixed on one side of the fuselage, and the light beam has to be deflected several times through the reflector to enter the continuously moving cutting head.
When the machine is transported or used for a long time, the angle of the lens may change slightly.
The light beam may seem to be aligned at a close distance, but it may deviate from the light entrance hole when reaching the cutting head, resulting in reduced cutting capacity, or even normal light output failure in severe cases. This is why many CO₂ laser devices require frequent light alignment.
According to Hard Krypton, when traditional CO₂ laser cutting machines perform light alignment, masking tape is usually pasted on the test position of the mirror frame, the laser is made to emit light for a short time, the light beam landing point is judged according to the scorch mark left on the paper, and then the reflector is adjusted. Some models are also equipped with a visible red indicator light to help users observe the spot position; but users still need to confirm that the red dot is consistent with the actual laser landing point.
For beginners, this process often takes nearly an hour.
Bambu Lab wrote in the product introduction of the R1 that this generation of products is equipped with its exclusive automatic laser calibration technology. Specifically, Bambu Lab designed an optical path calibration sensor with a crosshair. After the calibration sensor is installed on the laser head, calibration can be started with one click. The R1 will read the light beam on the crosshair, identify the optical path deviation and correct it, and the whole process can be completed within 1 minute.
Automatic Optical Path Calibration
Few people know that this optical path calibration sensor with crosshair is completely developed in-house by Bambu Lab.
They considered many solutions first, and the first considered CCD scheme was too costly, mostly used in scientific research scenarios, which was not realistic to be applied to consumer-grade equipment. Developing the optical path sensor from scratch became a necessary solution.
However, this is not new for Bambu Lab. When they were developing 3D printers before, they had independently designed multiple components.
Looking back at the process of "developing the sensor in-house", NIU Wei described it as both complicated and simple: "It is just like what the textbook teaches you to make a sensor." Find suitable sensing materials, determine the structure of the sensor, design the back-end modulation circuit...
The biggest variable is the selection of sensing materials. After excluding schemes such as CCD, the progress was once stagnant. So NIU Wei asked for help in the company's R&D group, and soon received a reply: a colleague once accidentally shone a laser pointer on a certain material when developing another product, and electrical signals were output.
But the challenges are yet to come.
With the selection idea confirmed, the solution can be verified quickly, but mass production cannot be achieved overnight. When NIU Wei got the first batch of processed sensors, some had no signal, and some wires broke directly in his hand. They spent a lot of time later optimizing the production process of the sensors.
Throughout the R&D process of the R1, developing the sensor in-house became the most "interesting" memory for NIU Wei. When he saw that multiple sets of signals from the sensor were gradually aligned with the laser and the signal quality got better and better, everyone felt that all the hard work paid off. "We all want to make something creative."
At present, when people pay more attention to engraving speed and processing format, developing the sensor in-house is not the most cost-effective choice, nor is it a mandatory parameter, and it is even just a bonus item.
"For Bambu Lab, the product is unqualified if it cannot realize (automatic light alignment)," NIU Wei told Hard Krypton.
Five years ago, on the eve of Bambu Lab launching the X1, no one thought that automatic leveling for 3D printing was a must-have feature.
2. Reuse and beyond reuse
In a sense, the automatic vibration compensation technology applied by Bambu Lab to 3D printers has changed users' expectations for the entire industry: Stable and consistent printing effect has gradually changed from a result after repeated debugging to something that the machine should be able to achieve.
Laser equipment also faces the same problem. Although additive manufacturing and subtractive manufacturing stack materials and remove materials respectively, they will encounter the same trouble during high-speed movement: when the tool head moves rapidly along the X and Y axes, once it stops suddenly or changes direction, the beam and the tool head may produce slight vibration due to inertia. On 3D printers, resonance will leave ripples on the surface of the model; while on laser cutting machines, resonance will amplify the processing defects.
At first, the R1 team thought this problem was not difficult to solve, which was nothing more than reusing the automatic vibration compensation technology from 3D printers on laser cutting machines, which is Bambu Lab's core competence.
As the number of engraving samples increased during the experiment, they found that the automatic compensation technology reused on laser equipment could not fully meet the product requirements.
Essentially, laser cutting has stricter requirements for motion accuracy than 3D printing. The lines extruded by 3D printing are relatively wide, while the engraved lines after laser focusing are much thinner. The same amplitude of offset falling on this thin line may cause obvious burrs on the edge.
It is extremely urgent to develop new technologies.
For a long time, the personnel in the control group were solving the problem of vibration patterns every day, and they could see the vibration patterns decreasing and the debugging effect improving every day, but they found that there were always some vibration patterns that could not be completely eliminated.
The problem of vibration patterns on the laser is like throwing a pebble into the lake: The first ripples aroused are obvious enough problems. After locating the cause and solving them, you will find that the vibration brought by the pebble is still continuing, and the small ripples hidden behind the large ripples will appear again and again...
Active Vibration Compensation
At the most difficult time, NIU Wei once thought about giving up solving part of the vibration pattern problems and reducing the engraving speed. "I was a little unwilling, after all, we had come so far; and if we reduced the speed, the user's processing time would become very long. Users would have to wait for a long time for results that could be obtained quickly. Thinking of this, I felt very unwilling."
According to Hard Krypton, while ensuring accuracy, the engraving speed of the R1 is 70% faster than laser cutting machines at the same price range.
More importantly, the automatic compensation technology accumulated in the R1 product not only broadens Bambu Lab's moat in this technology, but also will be fed back and applied to 3D printer products. In addition to the well-known shared MakerWorld accounts and the continued use of the Bambu Suite workflow, these technologies also tell a narrative of homologous symbiosis.
The picture frame and petals are cut by laser
Just like all hardware products, there are few dramatic moments that can be captured during the R&D process of the R1, and most of the stories are rather boring. For example, they made the R1 travel all the way from Shenzhen to Xinjiang and back in the car, just to solve the problem of camera positioning deviation caused by long-distance transportation; after noticing the residual smell of wood cutting smoke on their hair, they racked their brains to figure out how to solve the problem of smoke exhaust and smoke accumulation in a limited space...
What creation presents in the foreground is romantic: it is the translucent, tech-rich shell above the laser tube, and the Van Gogh's sunflower that breaks through the frame created by creators by combining laser and 3D printing. What creation presents in the background is also boring: it is the engineers' painstaking tests and adjustments, the problems that have been located one by one, and the moment when the current signal finally aligns with the laser beam.
At the end of the interview, Hard Krypton asked NIU Wei: "Do you think the whole process is interesting?"
"It is interesting," he answered quickly.
It has only just begun, and so has creation.