News

The plan for the coming weeks

Spaghetti Monster

Jul 14, 2022 — 4 min read

Our sales team is wrapping up everything from the Kickstarter and confirming addresses as I write this. The long-awaited shipments will begin next week, and some backers with airmail shipping will receive their printers in that same week. Here is the detailed list of what we are going to do and when it will happen.

Software

First things first. We will open source Bambu Studio 1.0.10 via GitHub on July 15th, before the shipping of our products to customers, as promised. There will be a more stable release v1.1.0 around July 22nd, which should be right at the time when our customers start to receive their printers.
Bambu Handy, our mobile app, is scheduled to hit the shelves on July 22nd. The iOS version has already passed Apple's review and the Android version is still under Google's review. We will provide apk download on our website too.
On July 22nd, there will be a major firmware release, which is under intensive testing right now. Anyone who receives their printer next week will be able to do an OTA update on their printers to get them the latest firmware immediately after activation.

Logistics

It is difficult to make every backer happy with the timeline for receiving orders. There will be "Why does A receive his printer earlier than me?" sort of questions. In reality, it is very difficult to make an absolutely fair solution because of the complicated global logistics system, not to mention that global shipping is not the most stable at the moment. With that in mind, I wanted to explain the general plan here to everyone. We will ship out the units generally following backing numbers. There may be a few exceptions, due to production continuity or minimal shipping volume. (i.e. We want to continue the X1C production for a straight week before we switch the line to X1.) Because of the shipping times to various countries, the dates that backers receive the units can be very different, sometimes by weeks. Please do not feel too upset if someone who has a later pledge receives their printer earlier. I promise that we’re doing our best!
Good news! As we are speaking, some of our X1 printers are already on multiple container ships at sea. Some have just left the port while others are already in the middle of the ocean for some days. It will take weeks before they arrive at their destination port and get transported to local warehouses, where they will get the final confirmed customers' address label and be handed off to local logistics partners, such as DHL and UPS. As soon as that happens, we will be able to provide you with tracking numbers. Some early backers with shipping by sea will receive the printers in July. The majority of our backers will receive their printers in August and September since the shipping takes about 6-8 weeks (as long as nothing crazy happens).
For the early backers who have the airmail shipping service, we will get the survey summary on the coming Friday and double check it before shipping them out next Monday (July 19th) from ShenZhen. Next week, these backers will start to receive their units. We will try to prepay the tariff for countries where it is possible. If not, the customer will have to pay the tariff and contact us for a refund on the tariff.

Spare parts, manuals and support

Last week, we shipped out the first batch of essential spare parts by air to our local warehouses. These are parts that we’ve found to be the mostly likely to need replacement, such as hot ends, fans, screens, cables, and glass covers. We know this is not enough to cover all cases, so the second batch of spare parts, which includes more SKUs, will be shipped out on July 15th, also by air. Hopefully they will cover most of the possible needs. We need time and real-world cases to understand which spare parts are needed and in what quantity, so please give us some time to adapt.
As with any tech product, there will be a small number of DOA (dead on arrival) units, so for countries where we have local warehouses, we will keep an inventory of spare printers, just in case. These are shipped out with the first batch of printers by sea, but with limited numbers. Since shipping printers back and forth is very expensive, if you do, unfortunately, find your printer DOA, please, please try working with us to repair it with spare parts and instructions before calling for a whole printer replacement so that the limited number of spare printers can go to people who have problems that cannot be resolved as easily. We really appreciate it!
Inspired by RepRap, our documentation will be in the form of a wiki. Our very early version, including the traditional manual part and how-to parts, including videos will be released around July 22nd. It is far from the rich documentation of RepRap, but we will start from there to build a versatile documentation system over time.
Our discord server has been online for some time. If you have any questions about the printer and want instant help, we have our team member together with a warm-hearted community there to help you out.

Customer support will be a very big topic and it deserves an independent blog post in the coming days.