How the Bloom Lamp Works, and Why It Prints With Almost No Supports

The Bloom lamp is the lamp you design in the Studio, right in your browser. You pick up to five of 26 petal designs, from Calla and Tulip to Protea and Turritella, let them grow, and choose colours that are real Bambu Lab filaments. The Studio turns your design into a project that is ready to print.

The lamp itself is a ball of flowers around a warm light: a shell about 15 cm across with 387 sockets, a petal in every socket, and a small LED module inside. The light shines through the petals' thin walls, so the lamp glows from every side.

The lamp has three kinds of printed parts: one shell, one LED housing and the petals. Every petal has the same stem, split into two halves with a lock ring. Push it straight into a socket until it clicks and its collar sits flat on the shell: the halves squeeze together on the way in and spring back behind the shell wall. Any petal fits any socket, and a petal can turn in its socket, so you can place them freely.

The light is Bambu Lab's LED Lamp Kit 001, a 5 V, 3 W warm white LED module on a 1.5 m USB cable. It sits on a tape pad inside the LED housing, and the housing locks into the opening of the shell with three lugs and a short anticlockwise turn. The cable leaves through a notch in the shell's rim.

An FDM printer lays each layer on top of the one below. A wall that leans out too far has nothing underneath it, so the slicer adds supports: temporary structures that hold the overhang up and are broken off after printing. In Bambu Studio, for example, the default support threshold is 30°: with supports switched on, any surface flatter than that from horizontal gets them.

Printed as one piece, a lamp covered in flowers would need supports almost everywhere: inside the shell, under every flower that faces sideways or down, and between the petals. That costs filament and printing time, and the supports leave marks that are hard to clean between hundreds of petals.

Instead of one complex object, the Bloom lamp is a set of simple ones. The petals print standing on their rims, side by side. The LED housing prints without supports.

Only the shell needs supports. It prints opening down, and a tree support grows in its middle to hold up the top of the dome. Its sockets are teardrop-shaped holes that point upward as it prints, a classic way to print a hole in a wall without support.

The petals are where the split pays off. A lamp has 387 of them, and they all print the same way: rim on the bed, stem up. The Starter lamp's petals fill five plates on a 256 mm bed, and not one of them needs a support.

A petal is a cup. Printed upside down, its rim becomes the first layer: a closed ring that sits flat on the bed, with a brim around it for grip. From there the walls rise toward the stem, and every new layer rests on the one below.

The Studio shapes every petal with this in mind. Where a petal grows wider going up from its rim, its outside is never allowed to lean out flatter than 35° from horizontal, 5° steeper than Bambu Studio's default support threshold. The Tulip in the picture, from the Starter lamp, never leans out flatter than 43°.

The only part of that Tulip flatter than 30° is the ledge of its snap lock, a ring about half a millimetre wide that every petal has. It is narrow enough for the printer to build without support.

Most of the 26 designs are steep inside the cup as well. A few, such as Petunia and Orchid, can have a small flat area there, depending on how they grow. Supports stay switched on in the project, so where a petal does need one, Bambu Studio adds it.

When you download, every petal shape is checked in its printing position: its walls must be at least 0.84 mm thick and it must be one closed piece, or the download stops.

The project places the petals largest first, so close that their 7 mm brims touch. Touching brims hold the petals well, so the project packs them tightly. The back-left corner stays free for the prime tower, which the printer uses when it changes filament.

The plates are laid out for your printer's bed: 180 × 180 mm for the Bambu Lab A1 mini, 256 × 256 mm for the A1, P1S and X1, and 330 × 320 mm for the large printers: the H2D, H2S, H2C and A2L. On a 256 mm bed, the Starter lamp is seven plates: the shell, the LED housing and five plates of petals, with 54, 65, 84, 115 and 69 petals.

The project opens in Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer with every plate, filament and setting in place. If you use another slicer, the download can include STL files, and these are the main settings to copy:

• Nozzle

  Value

  0.8 mm

• Layer height

  Value

  0.4 mm

• Walls

  Value

  2, with the Arachne wall generator

• Wall speed

  Value

  120 mm/s outer, 200 mm/s inner

• Supports

  Value

  On, top Z distance 0.25 mm

• Brim

  Value

  Outer brim only, 7 mm wide, 0.3 mm from the part

• Build plate

  Value

  Textured PEI, with a thin layer of glue

• Filament

  Value

  Bambu Lab PLA Basic or PLA Translucent, or PETG Translucent

From the printing instructions that come with every Bloom lamp download, which list every setting. Fine-tune them for your printer, filament and room.

PLA Basic and PLA Translucent colours can be mixed on one lamp. PETG doesn't bond well with PLA, so a PETG lamp is PETG throughout.

PLA softens from about 55 °C, so use only the LED kit or an equivalent 5 V USB module of 5 W or less, and never a mains bulb.

The Grow step has a slider for months of growth, from 0 to 12. At 0 the buds are closed. By 12, each petal has grown taller and curled in its own way. Bend leans each petal in its own direction, and Size patches groups large and small petals into areas of the shell.

Every setting changes the real print, not only the picture: the project is built by the same geometry kernel that draws the lamp in the Studio.

In the Colour step you choose PLA or PETG, then a style for the whole lamp:

• Original: each petal design in its own colour.
• Organic: a body colour with an accent colour at the heart and along the rim, and dots or vines painted onto every petal.
• Stripes: bands of colour from the rim to the stem, each colour change set in the project at its exact height.
• One colour: the whole lamp in a single spool.

Stripes and Organic change filament during a plate, so they are made for printing with an AMS. Organic needs every colour in every layer, so the AMS swaps more often than with Stripes: it prints slower and purges more.

• A printer with a bed of at least 180 × 180 mm. The download has layouts for Bambu Lab's 180 × 180, 256 × 256 and 330 × 320 mm beds, and STL files for other printers.
• A 0.8 mm nozzle.
• Bambu Lab PLA Basic or PLA Translucent, or PETG Translucent, in your lamp's colours. Filaments.txt in the download lists each filament and the plates it prints.
• An AMS for Stripes or Organic colours.
• The Bambu Lab LED Lamp Kit 001 and a certified 5 V USB power adapter, or a USB port.
• A glue stick for the build plate.

The Starter lamp, with Calla, Tulip and Lily petals in PLA Translucent Lavender, is free: enter your email address in the Studio and you get a link to download it. A lamp you customize is included in Leora's plans: Lite includes 20 customizations a year, Plus 100, and Pro 1,000 together with a commercial license to print and sell lamps worldwide.

Every download comes with the Bambu Studio project, the printing instructions, Filaments.txt and the license, and optionally the STL files.