New Biqu Panda Upgrades Let You Add a Lot of RGB Lighting to Your Bambu Lab Printer
This bumper new batch brings a variety of lighting options for your printer, plus organizational risers, power expansion, and more.
It’s been all of three or so weeks since Biqu launched its last crop of Panda-series upgrades for Bambu Lab 3D printers. In today’s attention economy that’s practically an eternity, so here we are again, reporting what may be the largest batch yet of accessories and upgrades for your Bambu Lab 3D printer. These new mods, gadgets and gizmos range from useful, to aesthetic, with some just silly.
The sheer volume of them all makes the head spin, and the way Biqu’s webstore presents things tends not to help, so we’ve tried our best to present an overview of what’s new in this expanded Pandaverse.
What’s New, Biqu? At a Glance
By our count there are thirteen all-new products, with varying compatibilities within the four series of Bambu Lab 3D printers. First up is a crop of RGB-centric products that give you multicolor lighting effects that can convey the status of the printer. The Panda Aura is the slickest. It’s a transparent plastic plate that fits underneath the A1 or A1 Mini, diffusing its internal RGB lighting to the edges. It also features a speaker, letting you configure custom status sounds in addition to the lighting effects.
A refresh of the Knomi printhead display brings its GIF-playing abilities into the third dimension with the Panda Knomi 3D. Functionally, it’s the same as the Knomi we’ve reported on before, but features a domed window that distorts the LCD display within to look like it protrudes from the printhead.
The A1 Mini also gets the Hue OTG, a machined metal carry handle with integrated LED lighting. Besides giving you a quick and convenient grabbing point to pick the Mini up and go, it appears that the LED’s cover can be swapped out for your own custom printed lithophane or other diffusion-based effect.
More RGB lighting can be found in the Panda Cooler A1, a printhead cooling upgrade for the A1 that piggybacks on the printhead, provides cooling to the extruder stepper motor as well as adding print status lighting and an additional nozzle light, which is included.
The Panda Alarm, curiously only available for the P-series, is another riff on printer status lighting, sitting to the side of the P1P or P1S printers and diffusing RGB lighting through a “cyber” aesthetic plastic panel. Like the Aura, the Alarm includes a speaker for custom MP3-based alert sounds.
If that wasn’t enough RGB for you (is there such a thing?) Biqu also now offers the Panda Lux PX, a P- and X- series compatible light strip that can be mounted inside the printers’ chambers.
There’s an update for the Panda Jetpack replacement printhead cover which now includes – you guessed it – more RGB lighting. The Jetpack V2 retains the original’s skeletonized looks and four-pronged cooling fan shroud, but integrates color LEDs for some vibrant light-based print monitoring. The argument could be made that any effort to gain performance from lightweighting the printhead housing – an aspect Biqu touted for the original Jetpack – is undone by carrying more RGB lights, but we’d also argue that this accessory has always been more about looks than anything else.
After all that color, the remaining Panda releases are mundane by comparison but, in part, integral to getting it all to work.
The base Bambu Lab printers have limited ports to spare, and the company isn’t a fan of users using them to power peripherals. That basically means if you want to RGB up your life and turn your 3D printer into a Christmas tree, you’ll need more output to power it all. The Panda Hub Plus offers up to 7 USB-C outputs (a mixture of 3A and 1.5A) for you to power more peripherals than the printer natively can. Powered via 5V/5A USB-C (provided with adaptor), the Hub Plus can be tucked away inside the P-series chamber for a tidier overall look. It’s also compatible with A-, X- series machines. A smaller, P-series specific Panda Hub is available, too, which splits those printers’ single USB port into two.
Meanwhile the Panda Branch Plus is a smarter step above, providing a mixture of 10 USB-C (3A, 1.5A) and 2-pin connectors. The intention with this one is to serve as a central hub for all the possible bells and whistles (but mostly RGB lights) you fit to your Bambu Lab printer. The Branch Plus has an MQTT gateway baked into it, letting you manage up to 20 MQTT-controlled peripherals, Biqu says.
Next (but not last) are the Panda Cushion XP shock-absorbing feet for X- and P- series machines. Detail is a little thin on the ground about what and how exactly these help. Less ambiguous is the Panda Diaper. A flexible sheet of silicone that sits inside the print chamber to prevent filament scraps and debris from entering the machine, it strikes me that the name Panda Diaper should have been reserved for a purge poop collection system of some kind. Oh well.
The last products of this saga to draw attention to are the Panda Station and Panda Den, designed to sit beneath the printer and provide storage and, in the Panda Den’s case, a place for purge poop to fall into. The Panda Station is an H2D-sized full trolley solution with humidity monitored filament storage and space for an AMS. Available “naked” as a set of shelves on casters, you can add the enclosure panels later. The Panda Den is more of a riser, sitting beneath A-, P- and X- series machines and offering convenient tool storage and purge poop collection.
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