In this video, we're going to be getting your Bamboo Lab A1 setup calibrated and printing. While this video is going to be a good visual help, as always, it's worth following along with the instructions in your box as well. Let's get into it. Inside your A1 box, you'll be greeted to a bag with your printer's build plate and instructions that you should read. Your filament spool holder, the upper part of your printer frame, the lower part of your printer frame, power cable, purge wiper, as well as some tubing, and your accessory box.

There are a few things hidden in the foam packaging, so double-check before chucking them out. Remove the foam and cable ties from your lower frame. And the very first thing we'll do is put your build plate on your heat bed. This just magnetically sticks on and ensure you align the center lip up with the notch on the heat bed. Ensure your screen is pointing the way it's shown here, and flip your base so you can see these four screws on the bottom. You'll find an appropriately sized Allen key in your accessories box and just undo these screws. This will free up your bed, which was locked in place for shipping. Next, grab the upper part of your frame and remove any packaging from it. Be careful not to cut any cables, belts, or anything like that when removing it. Also, be aware that you may have different packaging here. They sometimes update it from time to time. We have a bolted bracket holding our gantry in place, but you might have foam blocks and cable ties instead. Then place your upper frame standing upright and insert your lower frame through it. And then rotate it and place it in its slot. Make sure the screen is on the front side of the printer, and you haven't done this back to front, and that both parts of the frame are sitting nice and flush with each other. Next, slowly slide your print bed forward and pop the panel off the rear just by lifting it up. It's just clipped into place. Here you will find 10 screw holes with green circles around them. In your accessories box, you will find a bag of screws labeled for base housing. Just screw them into these 10 holes.

Then slowly push your bed backwards, and you'll find two more green holes that need these screws as well. And with that, we have locked the pieces of our frame together. So, we can move the bed forward and pop the cover back on. Just make sure you line it up, and when you do close it, it's sitting nice and flush again, and it's not popping up or anything like that as well. Then slide the bed back slowly again and place the printer facing upwards on the edge of a table like so. We put down a little bit of cardboard here to not scratch anything up. Here, it's probably worth making sure that your printer is secure and it's not going to slip off while you work on it. Grab the dangly cable box, put it into its groove, and gently slide it up until it clicks into place. Then we'll hold it in place by tightening the cable screw box. Then go ahead and plug in the other cables. The cable with the green tag goes into the green connector. The white tag into the white connector. Some real square peg, square hole stuff here. The yellow cable, however, will need to be untaped and routed through to its connector. There is a clip on the cable box here to help hold it in place. As long as it looks like this and you've got the right color to the right connector and the cables aren't poking out from their compartment here, you're going to be good. Now we can finally put our printer back on its feet. At this point, we realized we still had a sneaky bit of packaging still attached here on the side. So, we removed it, and we're going to slowly move the print head to the center of the rail. Next, grab your purge wiper and slide it onto the rail from behind. You'll then find a single bolt in a bag labeled for purge wiper. Screw it into the bottom of the purge wiper to hold it in place.

Now, we only have one thing left to do in our assembly, and that is to sort out our filament-holding situation. If you do not have the AMS light, you'll be using the spool holder. It just clips onto your frame and you'll need to plug one side of the PTFE tube into the print head and the other side into the filament inlet on your spool holder. If you bought the combo and you have an AMS unit, do not throw this out. You might need to use this for filaments that aren't compatible with your AMS. Some more fancy filaments don't like being fed through it, so you might need to use this one instead if you want to print them on your printer. Now, we only have the standard version of the A1 here without the AMS unit, but setup is so easy. So, here is an artist's rendition of how to do it. Grab the bottom stand and with the four screws in the bag labeled for AMS light, bolt it into your AMS unit. Then, grab the four spool holders and put the green holders on the green rods and the yellow holders on the yellow rods. Next, grab your bundle of PTFE tubes that will feed the filament from the AMS to the machine. And note that there is a side with a white clip and a side with a gray clip. On the side with the white clip, plug the four tubes into the top of your print head. The order does not matter here. Then on the gray side, plug the four tubes into the top outlets from the AMS. Again, the order doesn't matter, but two of the tubes will be a little bit longer, so it might be smart to put them on the side furthest away from the machine, just that way, you know, everything reaches a bit better. The black cable coming out of your print head can also attach to the white clip to help keep it out of the way. Even if you don't have the AMS combo, you'll still have one of these coming with your spool holder. So, do it if you don't have the AMS as well. Then, go ahead and plug the cable from the AMS unit into the back port of your A1. This will provide your AMS with both power and data.

And with that, your A1 is ready to go, regardless if you got the AMS or not. The next thing to do is plug in the power cable and boot it up. The first time you power it on, the machine will go through its first-time setup and calibration. Super straightforward. It gives you all the steps that you need to do. You just need to follow along and do what it tells you to do. In this process, it'll also ask you to connect your printer to a Wi-Fi network. This will let you remotely send prints from your PC or mobile to the printer, as well as remotely view it and easily keep it up to date. If you instead want to keep your machine offline, you can do so by just skipping the Wi-Fi setup. And you can transfer your models to the printer via the micro SD card slot on the front. Bamboo also has instructions on updating your machine offline via the SD card. Just search and you'll find it. But regardless if you're using Wi-Fi or keeping it offline, getting your machine updated is most definitely worth it. After running all the calibration tests, which can take a good 30 minutes or so, you'll be greeted to your main screen, and your printer is ready to go. But let's go ahead and get your first print going. If you hit print, you will see all the print files that are ready to go on the SD card. These here are the demo ones that came with your machine. We are going to be printing the benchy boat, but first we need to put some filament in the machine itself. Chances are in your box you would have found a little bit of filament which is just enough to print the benchy to get you going with. If however you have a proper roll of filament ready to go, you can just load that in instead. If you have the AMS unit, loading the filament is super easy. You just put your spool onto the holder, press the yellow button, and feed your filament up into the AMS until it detects it, and the motors will automatically grab it and load it in for you. If you're like us and don't have an AMS unit, start by selecting filament on your menu screen and hitting load. It'll then walk you through the process of loading in your filament. While it heats up, put your spool onto the holder, and once it's heated up, it'll ask you to push the filament through the little inlet tube through there. You just need to push it through till it reaches the head and then it will grab it and extrude it through and purge the nozzle and do everything that it needs to do. Now, you also need to tell the machine what filament you've actually just put into it. Here you can tell the machine what kind of filament it is, what color it is, and what brand it is. Just select generic if you can't find the brand of filament that you're using. We've put Bamboo PLA Basic in, so we'll select that here. Later on, if you've set up Wi-Fi, you can remotely change this through a piece of software, so you don't have to do it on your printer every time. Now, we can finally go ahead and hit print, select our benchy, and start printing. It is sort of a cultural thing here that this is the first model that you print on a new 3D printer. It's kind of the hello world of a brand new printer. And it's not going to be a very long print. It's only going to take about 20 minutes.

And after that, you will have done your very first 3D print. Very nice. And you are now ready to go out and start printing whatever you want. If you're looking for maybe a second thing to print, we would recommend printing one of these poop baskets. Yes, it is silly, but that's what people call it. It's kind of the name that stuck. When you loaded that filament in, and probably when the print started as well, it would have thrown these little bits of plastic to the side. So, it's probably smart to go ahead and print a collector to collect them so they don't go everywhere. to do. So, you could head on over to Maker World, which is Bamboo Lab's model library, and search for A1 poop basket. Stop laughing at the name there. Find one you like and go ahead and print it out. They often just clip onto your filament and wiper, and they don't need screws. It's a really common thing. You'll find so many different ones of them. Now, you will likely need to use a piece of software called Bamboo Studio, which is what you'll use to prepare models to be printed on your A1. We are not going to be covering it in this video, but we're just pointing you to a good thing to learn next. And with that, your Bamboo Lab A1 is set up, calibrated, and ready to go. If you need a hand with anything from this guide, feel free to head on over to our community forums. We're all makers over there, and we're happy to help. Until next time, though, happy making.