I’ve been running BigTreeTech’s Panda Touch on my P1S for a while now, and the short version is: it’s a genuinely good upgrade. The longer version is that it’s good despite Bambu Lab, not because of them — and that’s worth talking about.
What it actually gets right
The stock screen on a P1S is fine, in the sense that a monochrome screen from a 2000 flip phone is “fine.” Panda Touch fixes the part that was never going to scale: a 5-inch touchscreen on a magnetic base that detaches and runs on battery for up to 30 minutes, so you’re not stuck standing at the printer to check or change anything. That mobility alone made it worth the upgrade.
The bigger win is multi-printer management. Once you’re running more than one machine, the idea of bouncing between two stock screens (or two phone app sessions) gets old fast. Panda Touch handles up to ten printers from one interface, and the AMS controls are easier to get to than digging through the Bambu Handy menus.
Adding Panda Sense, BTT’s companion temperature/humidity sensor, rounds it out. Real-time chamber readings right on the same screen you’re already using is exactly the kind of small addition that makes a tool feel complete rather than half-finished. One limitation worth flagging: Panda Sense only reports temp and humidity while the Panda Touch is docked. Pull the screen off the base to carry it around, and that data disappears until you put it back. Makes sense given how the connection works, but it’s a real tradeoff between portability and always-on monitoring, not a bug.
Where it falls apart, and whose fault that actually is
Here’s the part that’s been more frustrating than anything about the hardware itself: my P1S is on firmware 1.8, and on that version, drying filament in the AMS means pulling the spools out of the feed motors first. No leave-it-loaded option. Run the cycle, then reload everything by hand — which defeats a good chunk of the point of having an automated drying feature in the first place.
Here’s the thing though: Bambu actually fixed this. Firmware releases past 1.8 added the ability to dry without removing the spools, at least for most filament types (PLA still needs a workaround, since it can soften inside the feed funnel if rotated while heated). So the feature exists. I just can’t get to it, because updating past 1.8 is also the firmware line where Bambu locked down authentication for third-party tools, and crossing that line breaks Panda Touch’s actual control functions, not just the drying convenience.
So I’m stuck choosing between two annoyances: stay on 1.8 and pull spools by hand every time I dry filament, or update and lose the reason I bought a $80 touchscreen in the first place. That’s not a hardware limitation. That’s not even really a software limitation. That’s a business decision sitting directly between me and a feature that already exists and already works.
The actual issue: Bambu doesn’t want you using tools like this at all
In January 2025, Bambu Lab rolled out what it called an authorization and authentication system, and it named names. The new firmware gated print initiation, motion control, fan and hotend control, AMS configuration, calibration, remote video, and firmware upgrades behind Bambu’s own authorization path — and it explicitly called out Panda Touch and OrcaSlicer as tools the restriction was aimed at limiting. It’s the same wall Bambuddy is built to work around, giving you self-hosted control of your printer without depending on Bambu’s cloud or its permission to use it.
Bambu’s official response was that this was being mischaracterized, that the company welcomes legitimate third-party accessory and software partnerships, and pointed to its work with Slice Engineering as proof. They also offered a three-way choice: stay on old firmware, move to Bambu’s own new tooling, or flip into Developer Mode and accept you’re on your own without official support. Status data, like MQTT pushes to Home Assistant, was left untouched. That’s a real distinction worth giving them credit for — this was never a total blackout of every third-party integration, just control actions specifically.
But “control actions specifically” is exactly the category Panda Touch lives in. A touchscreen that can only watch your printer and not actually run anything is a $80 paperweight with good WiFi. And the practical fallout has been exactly what you’d expect: BigTreeTech has had to tell its own customers not to update their printer firmware, because doing so permanently breaks Panda Touch compatibility. Read that sentence again. A company is telling people not to update the device they paid for, because the manufacturer of that device keeps closing the door behind it.
This isn’t an isolated dust-up either. Bambu’s slicer is built on AGPLv3-licensed code, a license that requires derivative works to stay open — and the company is currently facing formal scrutiny over how that license interacts with its cloud-access restrictions. Separately, in April 2026, Bambu sent a cease-and-desist to the maintainer of a Polish OrcaSlicer fork that had restored direct printer control the authorization system had removed, despite that fork being built on Bambu’s own published AGPL source.
Why this matters for anyone considering Panda Touch
None of this is a reason to skip Panda Touch. It’s a well-built piece of hardware solving a real problem, and BigTreeTech has been responsive about adapting when Bambu changes the rules underneath them. But it’s worth going in with eyes open: you are buying a device whose core functionality exists at the pleasure of a company that has, repeatedly and on the record, narrowed what third-party tools are allowed to do with printers people already own. BigTreeTech can patch around firmware changes when Bambu lets them. They can’t do anything if Bambu decides not to.
That’s the actual review. The hardware is good. The mobility is good. The multi-printer management is good. The Panda Sense add-on is a nice touch, pun unavoidable. And all of it sits on a foundation that could get pulled out from under it with Bambu’s next firmware release — the same foundation that’s already holding me on firmware 1.8, manually pulling spools to dry filament, because the version where Bambu fixed that exact problem is also the version where Panda Touch stops working.
Bambu makes excellent printers. If they put half the effort into being a good platform for the people building on top of their hardware as they put into making the hardware itself, this wouldn’t even be a conversation worth having.