[3D Printing] How to Integrate Your Bambu Lab 3D Printer into Home Assistant

【3D Printing】How to Integrate Your Bambu Lab 3D Printer with Home Assistant

Looking to connect your Bambu Lab printer to Home Assistant?
Here's everything you need to know about how to do it!

Given the ubiquity of 3D printers and smart home devices these days, it's not uncommon to find them under the same roof.
Bambu Lab and Home Assistant have become household names for fast and reliable 3D printers and IoT or smart home control hubs, respectively.
If you want to further streamline your 3D printing experience, it's quite simple to have both communicate and access your printer directly from Home Assistant.

Whether it's simply displaying information in a central location or executing a series of well-designed actions and integrations, the two are a perfect match.
In this article, we'll cover what Bambu Lab printers and Home Assistant are, why you might want to connect them, and how to go about the process.

If you haven't heard, Bambu Lab makes incredibly fast and popular 3D printers for the modern market, including the top-spec X1E, the fast and plug-and-play X1C, the compact and easy-to-use A1 and A1 Mini, and the more affordable yet still capable P1S.
In recent years, these printers have become very popular and are a common sight in the homes of makers, tinkerers, and more.

Bambu's printers already include a wealth of networking capabilities and out-of-the-box connectivity, designed for use within Bambu's cloud ecosystem, which also provides a good foundation for leveraging IoT platforms like Home Assistant.

Home Assistant is free, open-source IoT software that acts as a central hub for smart home devices on a local network.
This stands in contrast to the cloud-based, closed approach of many IoT and smart home systems, with Home Assistant typically running directly on small computers like the Raspberry Pi.
It allows for the management of various devices, such as cameras, speakers, lights, and, of course, 3D printers!

Let's take a closer look at why connecting these two setups can be useful.

Why do this?
Connecting your Bambu printer to your Home Assistant setup means easy monitoring and control of the device from a central dashboard!
Through such an integration, you can monitor a wealth of data collected by the printer.
This includes fan speeds, temperatures, current print statistics, AMS information, live printer camera views, and much more!

Not only can you view data, but you can also command the printer to perform certain tasks.
You can pause, resume, or stop the current print, toggle any indicator lights (if equipped), and view printer diagnostic information... the examples are endless.

One of Home Assistant's most popular features is the ability to add automation between different devices.
For example, your printer can notify you that it needs more filament by changing the color of your indoor lights, or it can automatically start or stop printing based on readings from a smart humidity sensor—the possibilities are endless!



What do you need to do?
There are several ways to connect your Bambu Lab printer to Home Assistant, such as using MQTT/NodeRed.
This method connects the printer and the Home Assistant hub via a traditional MQTT connection on the local network.

However, in this article, we'll focus on Greg Hesp's ha-bambulab integration, as it is versatile and widely supported.
It allows for selective connection via Bambu's existing cloud ecosystem and has a simpler setup process, while retaining easy access to a wealth of data and print integration.

To connect your Bambu Lab 3D printer to Home Assistant via the ha-bambulab integration, you will need:

1. A Bambu Lab 3D printer (connected to the same Wi-Fi network as your Home Assistant setup).
2. Home Assistant

Keep in mind that depending on your printer model, the setup may vary slightly. For example, the P1 and A1 series require a local connection for live camera feeds to work in Home Assistant (though you can supplement this with a cloud connection if you wish).
X1 series printers also require an additional setting to be enabled (LAN mode live view) for the above functionality.

Install HACS
First, you'll need the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) to be functional.
You can find a guide on how to install HACS here.
In short, you install HACS into your Home Assistant hub, and from there you get easy access to a huge amount of custom integrations and elements that the community has built for Home Assistant.

Install ha-bambulab
Once HACS is set up, you can install the actual integration! The simplified way is to access this link from any device on the same network as your Home Assistant installation.
This will automatically install the integration. However, if this doesn't work, you can try doing it manually:

1. Go to HACS in Home Assistant, click on the three dots in the top right corner, and select the "Custom repositories" option.
2. Add the required custom repository in the "Integrations" category by entering "greghesp/ha-bambulab" in the "Repository" box and selecting "Integration" under "Category."
3. Once saved, you should see the integration at the top of the HACS main menu, aptly named "Bambu Lab"; download and install it. (If you don't see it, try searching for "Bambu Lab" in the search box near the top.)
4. While not strictly necessary, it is recommended to restart Home Assistant at this point to ensure the integration can discover your printer in the next steps.

Add your printer
1. In Home Assistant's settings, access the "Devices & Services" section.
2. Click the "Add Integration" button to search for and add the newly installed integration, which you can find again under the name "Bambu Lab."
3. As mentioned, you should now be able to choose between cloud and local connections. Select the one you prefer.
If required, provide the login details for your Bambu Lab account.
If you choose a local connection (or choose to use a cloud connection as well), you will need to provide the printer's IP address and access code.
The process for finding these is very similar to setting up Bambu Studio's LAN-Only mode.

Integrating your Bambu printer into Home Assistant is cool, but it's not very useful without a way to view information or interact with the printer.

Fortunately, you can easily create beautiful and powerful custom dashboards to display your printer's data!
Many users have already shared their dashboard setups, from which you can draw inspiration, or you can create your own completely.
WolfwithSword allows you to generate your own custom YAML to create a sleek dashboard for your printer.

If you prefer automation, there are many possibilities in this section!
You can create different automations that trigger many possible events and command other devices in your Home Assistant network, such as changing the LED color around the printer based on the printer's status.
Automations can be easily added to the integration configuration, located in "Devices & Services > Bambu Lab."

Now, your Home Assistant should be able to communicate with your Bambu Lab printer!
Go ahead and add more possibilities to your printing tasks with this super cool configuration!

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