Bambu Lab ArUco Tags for Smooth PEI & Textured Sheets

This model provides ArUco calibration tags for BambuLab printers matching both the Bambu High Temprature PEI plate for use with any smooth PEI sheet and the Bambu Dual-Sided Textured PEI plate for use with any textured PEI sheet.

Since some plates come in orientations where the bottom tab is facing left and some facing right, the original model this was remixed from did not work for all cases. This provides tags for both smooth and textured beds in both left- and right-tab orientations.

How & Why To Use

Bambu printers use these tags to identify the type of build plate in the printer. Since the slicer takes the build plate as a parameter when slicing, this allows the printer to warn you if you try to print a model sliced for one type of bed on a different type, which typically causes adhesion issues and print failures. By using tags like this, you can use third-party build plates and still keep this warning to prevent failed prints.

To use these:

1. Open the included 3MF design in Bambu Slicer
2. The model contains four assemblies, one each for each {smooth/textured}+{left/right} orientation pair. They are named {orientation}_tab_{bed type}. Right click each assembly you do not care about and unselect the “Printable” option. This will ensure you only print the tags you care about.
3. Print the model with an AMS using black & white filament. I find they come out better on textured plates, but in theory should work fine on smooth plates as well.
4. Attach the tags to your build plate using heat-safe tape. I have had good luck with this tape from Amazon.

Details

This section contains technical details on how the tags work, and how Bambu tags their plates. If you only want to use the tags and don't care about the engineering background, you can skip this section.

ArUco tags are a system of 2D fiducial tags used in robotics applications for pose estimation and calibration. You can read more details on them in the OpenCV docs for using them.

Bambu has shipped tags using both the 4x4 tag library, and the 5x5 tag library. Seemingly the printer can read either without issue, though the 4x4 tags seem to be more common and are used here since they require less xy-resolution and are a bit easier to print. Bambu-shipped plate+tag combos are as follows:

You can read the tags pretty easily using Python + OpenCV to read an existing image. I used this example on Github to parse the tags I had and extract the values from images on Bambu's website.