The BIQU Panda upgrades worth buying

The P1P and P1S shipped without a touchscreen, and that single omission is the most common complaint about the best-selling enclosed machine in the lineup. The Panda Touch answers it directly: a 5-inch touchscreen that mounts in the existing screen cutout and draws power from the printer's own USB port, so there is no wiring job and no external supply.

Two details raise it above a convenience. The registry records that it controls up to ten Bambu printers from one unit, which makes it the cheapest print-farm console available, and that the vendor states installation does not void the printer warranty — unusual for third-party hardware and worth knowing before you open the box.

The honest risk is the one every third-party control layer carries: firmware sitting between you and the printer can lag behind a Bambu update, so a machine update occasionally means waiting for the screen to catch up. The full Panda Touch review covers that, and the camera upgrade page covers the variant that fixes the stock camera at the same time.

This is the least exciting item in the Panda range and the one most likely to pay for itself. Plates are consumables: skin oils and scraping both shorten PEI life, and when adhesion finally goes, a machine with one plate stops printing while a machine with two keeps going.

The registry records the PyroGrip as textured PEI on the same mounting system as the official plate at a cited price position of roughly half it, which is what turns “keep two or three plates on the shelf” from an indulgence into an obvious decision. No adapter, no modification — it drops onto the magnetic bed you have.

What to expect: third-party PEI varies more in thickness and coating consistency than one brand's own line does, so plan on re-checking Z offset when you swap brands mid-queue. That is a two-minute job, not a problem. The build plate roundup ranks the whole field.

On a P1S a nozzle change is a hotend job. The practical consequence is that nobody does it, so everything gets printed at 0.4 mm whether that is the right choice or not — functional parts that would be faster at 0.6 mm, fine detail that wants 0.2 mm.

The Revo system changes nozzles by hand in seconds, and the registry lists this hotend for the P1S, P1P and X1C with high-flow, high-speed positioning. That is the single feature people pay P2S money for, bought as a part.

Two real costs. You are off the official hotend, which makes a Bambu support conversation harder, and Revo nozzles cost more per nozzle than Bambu's own. Flow calibration also has to be redone — do not expect old profiles to be exactly right. The nozzle roundup compares it against the official hardened parts.

This part is in the picks to make a point about the Panda range: a lot of it is repair hardware rather than upgrade hardware, and buying it preemptively is how people spend money without changing a print.

Extruder gears are a wear item. Worn ones under-extrude, and under-extrusion looks like six other faults — gaps in top surfaces, weak layers, inconsistent walls. The registry lists these as golden nano-coated hardened steel, fitting the X1, P1 and A1 series, with better grip stated for PLA, PETG, TPU and ABS. The TPU case is the one people report most: the stock set slips on soft filament.

Diagnose before you buy. The Bambu wiki's own extruder procedure is the reference for getting in there, and print quality issues is the page for working out whether the gears are actually your fault.