Three Bambu Lab Tinkering Projects Worth Trying

Bambu Lab printers are designed to work out of the box, but the company hides a few capabilities behind its own cloud ecosystem. If you run your printer in LAN-only mode, a handful of community projects can fill the gaps. Here are three that actually deliver.

Manage your whole farm with Bambuddy

Bambu Farm Manager exists, but it is limited. Bambuddy is a self-hosted alternative that runs in any browser and exposes every major printer function: start, stop, cancel, load files, watch the camera, and check status. If you run a farm of five or fifty printers, the dashboard shows all of them at once.

The software is open source, so you can modify it to your needs. One user reportedly tweaked it to switch printer lights on and off at specific intervals, letting him scan a room and see which machines were idle, active, or in error. That kind of customization is impossible with Bambu Cloud.

Hook your printer into Home Assistant

Bambu Lab already has a Home Assistant integration, and it is surprisingly capable. Once linked, you can control nearly every aspect of the printer from a mobile dashboard. The basic setup shows camera feeds, print progress, and remaining time.

You can go further. Set RGB lighting to green when the printer is idle, yellow during a print, purple on completion, and flashing red for errors. Tie notifications to print milestones: start, 25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent, finish, and even a snapshot of the completed model. All of this runs locally without touching Bambu's cloud.

Add active drying to the AMS Lite with the SUNLU heater

The AMS Lite does not include a built-in dehumidifier, so anyone in a humid climate deals with moisture absorption sooner or later. SUNLU sells an AMS Lite Heater that fits inside the existing enclosure in about 15 minutes. It adds active drying with a target humidity mode that kicks on automatically when moisture rises too high.

It is not a permanent mod. The installation preserves all original AMS Lite parts and can be reversed. You just drop the heater shroud in, route the power, and select a preset for your filament type. Loading spools is slightly more cumbersome with the heater in place, but for makers who battle wet filament, the tradeoff is worth it.