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- videos@lemmy.ml
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- videos@lemmy.ml
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I have no regrets with my fine European Prusa printers.
This is a risk with any item that requires software to function. Companies can change software licensees, lock-in buyers, and even open source can flat out abandon a project.
I just bought a Bambu Mini to sit along side my trusty 6 year old Mk3s+ and this pisses me off to no end. I was expecting my mini to simply be abandoned rather than suffer a lock-in AND then abandonment. So, I guess I won’t be updating my firmware nor will I run anything through their cloud. I was thinking of uploading a few designs to their cloud. But that ain’t going to happen now.
This is a risk with any item that requires software to function.
Absolutely not true, it’s only a risk on products with cloud dependencies. Which is exactly why I ensure every electronic device I own doesn’t have that.
You have never had older software devices go bad have you? It’s not only cloud connected stuff you lose.
To comment on one of your points, something that gets lost when people learn about open source (at least most traditional licenses): nobody can change the license of something that was released so you have the option to fix it yourself or hire someone else to do it for you. While it’s incredibly powerful thing to have, many people only look at open source as “free (as in beer) stuff with free support”. Thing is, even if there’s no chance in earth you’ll fix it yourself, it’s likely someone out there who’s in the same situation will do it and make available for others. Key here is having popular and open enough hardware that people can replace or the software completely or keep its development (if open).
As open source printers go, you can always use the parts to convert it to a different printer but that requires tinkering. Perhaps this move will piss off enough some Bambu users that they’ll make the switch away from the “I just want something that works” mindset into tinkers.
There are licenses can be changed. Even you admit it.
I was looking at a mini, someone recommended Bambu. I might just stick with my old ender 3 pro until it stops functioning.
There is really no reason for your ender to stop functioning. 90% of it is off the shelf parts, and things like wiring harnesses and custom stuff are also available.
There’s an open source firmware for the X1
As a relatively new X1C owner and a noob to the hobby, thank you for sharing this. I installed it a few hours ago and it seems to be working basically just as good as bambu’s firmware as far as I can tell.
I’m going to be going with X1Plus and OrcaSlicer from here on out, because this shit from bambu lab ain’t cool.
Installing right now.
I originally had thought, “I mean I always have that option”. Now it’s clear that option may disappear at any time.
And done. Seems their servers are overloaded. The unlock confirmation page looped for a while til it finally let me through to choose my printer and unlock it.
Also, just fyi. https://www.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/comments/1h2wa56/send_files_from_orcaslicer_without_network_plugin/ Pandaprint is a nice shim that allows ditching the Bambu Labs network plugin in orcaslicer. Planning to review and then stand this up tonight.
Wish there was a version for the A1… Regretting my blackfriday purchase…
The more people that get involved with it, then the more printers it would support
This may sound like a dumb idea. But cant we just fork there firmware and flash our own? It runs klipper under the hood which means its a gpl license?
–edit there is X1plus firmware which is opensourced
They have their own closed firmware I think. So someone has to create a new one from scratch for each product.
I do like that my Aquilla can be modded so I can use whatever firmware (and literally any other hardware that fits) I want because it’s open source and based on the Ender 3.
I haven’t look at their hardware so I don’t know if you can flash custom firmware but at the very least you could buy a new board and kick them to the curb.
The current firmware has a lan only mode that the new firmware will now require a cloud based login to work. So if you already own one the best option is to turn lan only mode on and block it from the Internet from your router firewall, and uninstall bambu handy™️ and bambu studio™️ and use orca slicer instead.
I assume it will still be able to print from the SD card with the new firmware but not sure, haven’t looked into that yet.
I was talking about replacing their firmware or their control board with a marlin board if it wasn’t compatible.
There’s a custom firmware already, I haven’t tried it yet: https://github.com/X1Plus/X1Plus/wiki
If you were buying Bambu you already didn’t care about this
You would think that everybody owning a 3D printer would at least be somewhat of a tinkerer and therefore oppose this. Looking around however I’ve already seen a frustrating amount of people ridiculing the people calling this out. You’re probably right though and the people who don’t care will probably mostly have gathered around Bambu.
The whole point of bambu was that it was a 3d printer for people who didn’t want to tinker.
The people on this sub assume everyone who buys products do a ton of research on the companies making those products instead of just watching a couple reviews.
Most people are not as informed as those that appear in a dedicated 3d printing sub.
I care. I bought Bambu anyway, because there’s a LAN only option. I enabled it today. I am also not going to upgrade firmware.
I’ve been considering a Bambu until today. From what I learned today, there is no Lan only option. It now must connect to their servers to let you print. They also said they will disable your ability to print if you don’t upgrade the firmware.
I wouldn’t buy a new Bambu now. But the one I have has a LAN only option, and i assume it will keep it as long as I don’t upgrade my firmware.
I don’t see how they would disable my printer without updating firmware. Maybe I should block all internet communication just to be sure.
You should definitely block it from having internet access. I don’t see any way how they’d prevent us from printing when not on the latest firmware if it can’t phone home.
there’s a LAN only option. I enabled it today.
Do you trust it to not “phone home” anyway?
I assume it does. If I had a big problem with that, I wouldn’t have connected it to the internet in the first place.
However, the talk about disabling printers without this update makes me think I should probably block it.
That’s a separate issue from requiring internet access / cloud / their servers to be online to print.
It’s not that difficult to go into your router and just block all external traffic from a device so yes I trust mine not to phone home.
For how long? 3d printer firmware upgrades often bring some meaningful enhancements. Imagine that might be hard to resist forever
Forever is a long time. I’m sad I won’t get upgrades, but I didn’t expect any when I bought it. I’ll be fine for a while.
When I feel that big an itch for a new thing, I’ll buy a new thing. Probably something Prusa branded.
I’m very glad I didn’t buy one of their printers. The RFID tag thing was enough to keep me from buying anything from them. This is even worse.
The RFID tag thing was enough to keep me from buying anything from them
Why?
I was worried that Bambu would try to pull the same crap that Dymo did with their label printers.
Their implementation of RFID is closed source iirc.
Its the start of exactly the kind of thing that inkjet printers are doing with DRM in their cartridges.
RFID-identifying rolls of filament is a good thing. I would like that very much. I can’t count the number of times I loaded the wrong roll and printed with the wrong material on our Prusa Mk4. Not to mention, I would like that the printed warned me if the roll I’ve loaded doesn’t contain enough filament to complete the print I’m about to start.
What I really would have a beef against is the printer refusing to print with anything that isn’t RFID-tagged from Bambu.
But to my knowledge, Bambu printers don’t do that. They don’t prevent you from using generic rolls do they?
Not yet anyway, but considering what a shit company Bambu Lab is, they certain could and probably will at some point. Still, for the time being, they don’t.
Is your concern the fact that they could suddenly lock Bambu printers to Bambu-approved filaments?
What if Prusa implemented RFID roll identification? Would you feel the same way?
What if Prusa implemented RFID roll identification?
Yes of course. Any machine that has DRM on it and has the ability to kill itself when its company demands, is a piece of worthless junk.
RFID isn’t DRM. But let’s overlook that.
So the trustworthiness of the company implementing RFID doesn’t matter at all to you?
There are no trustworthy companies… The whole point of a company is to act in its own best interest. If they can sell you something that they can later utilize to extract money from you, then they will do it.
But this particular RFID has some sort of encryption-something, that means that other companies can’t make them.
I don’t like it, but since I can still use other brands without the convenience of RFID tags, it’s not a deal-breaker.
I loaded third-party filament onto my spools with RFID several times and it worked fine.
I have since started printing almost exclusively from a filament dryer (AMS lite works fine this way), so it doesn’t matter anymore.
But this particular RFID has some sort of encryption-something
Ah right I didn’t know. I thought they used plain-jane ASCII tags with some known documented format.
That sucks.
The Problem with the RFID wasnt that is was tagged, but that the Codes of the RFID Chips werent publicly availible to write onto any spool Filament that has RFID in it.
I use Spoolman with labels to manage that, plugs into klipper so tracks usage, can swap filament on the screen. It supports qr code labels too, wanting to do something with scan in/scan out in the future but just having my filament tracked is helpful.
Y’all, I fell for it.
I bought a Bambu X1C and fully regret it. Just sent them a return request and called their product Defective by design in my RMA. I don’t expect them to acknowledge it but I figured I would send them a hefty fu first. I’m spending the rest of my afternoon downgrading firmware on this thing until I can install X1plus on it. Where am I buying my next 3D printer? Prusa? Do they have a bigger one that can print ppa-cf?
- “They played us like a damn fiddle!” Kazuhira Miller
Are you within the EU? If yes, there is a good chance you can force them to return it - they fall under German law as Bambu Lab EU is based in Germany and German consumer protection laws are very strict in that terms.
Just did this yesterday. You won’t need the whole afternoon. It was surprisingly simple.
Could also go down the voron route as they’re big but don’t know if someone’s made cf capability but I’d bet so
I wonder how easy would it be to swap the controller for something more open like the BTT boards? That way you’d get the nice design and an open platform. I’m not sure how much of their wiring could be repurposed for this though.
The controller, at least in the A1 and A1 mini, is an ESP chip. Probably an ESP32S3. You don’t need to swap any hardware, just open it up and find its UART pins to flash it.
(I know they’re ESPs because the device name shows up as espressif on my router)
That doesn’t mean it’s the board actually controlling the printer though. It could just be used as an interface component because they’re easy to use as the middle-man on network connected devices.
I am fairly sure it’s what is controlling the printer.
Looking at the board, I think you’re right but it’s definitely a custom board so exposing the UART might be fairly difficult.
Although it looks like it wouldn’t do much good (no klipper support for esp32)
You’d be surprised how often the UART is already exposed for factory programming.
As well, what I gathered from that thread is that they aren’t supported, because it’s a bit of overhead, and because they aren’t supported no one makes ESP32 printer boards. I think if suddenly a whole bunch of folks with A1s wanted to replace the firmware that might be a good userbase to add support for?
Maybe, maybe not it’s hard to say. I think most BL printer owners don’t really care or don’t want to mess with soldering tiny wires to tiny pads on their board and mess with flashing the device. The people buying these are generally not the tech-fiddling type.
I’m the tech-fiddling type and I bought one, my housemate is the tech-fiddling type and she bought one, our friend is the tech-fiddling type and she bought one. We all bought them because we wanted to spend our tech-fiddling time on the projects themselves and not on the printer.
Saw this from the moment they did the rfid nonsense, doubled down on my beliefs when they started burning cash on advertising like crazy. Tons of youtubers and such shill this shit
They had a series b round in 2023 of an undisclosed amount with several chinese vc companies and they’ve had investments in 2021 and 2022 as well. I don’t know how chinese vc works but I assume it’s similar to american vc where there is a strong demand from the backer(s) to monetize in this fashion
Why do you think reddit went to shit? Series b in 2014. Those people drop serious cash. Reddits seed round in 2005 at y combinator was for 100k. That’s serious money to you and me, but to vc people that’s not worth getting out of bed. Reddits 2014 series b was fifty million. They suddenly had a gigantic influx of cash to grow infrastructure and compete with the big dogs like meta and twitter. They were fairly successful with this. They then raised 1.2 billion over 4 rounds from 2017-2021. That’s why they had a relatively quick turn to shit; that money was to try to make the site bland and profitable in preparation for ipo. It worked out because the stock made investors a ton of cash at the expense of making the site dogshit
Bambu will have a similar trajectory. Investors will give them an amount of money that is frankly obscene, they will use that money to develop (and probably to party, ridiculous salaries and/or fluff jobs, and have really fancy offices), then they will actively make the product worse. 5 years from now they will have used that money to entrench themselves in the market space. Don’t be surprised if the average person thinks “bambu” when they think “3d printer” because they pissed away 10s of millions on advertising. But their printers will have more consumer hostile bullshit (finally fully locking out 3rd part filament instead of just requiring you to do a pain in the ass respooling seems inevitable) like this and it would not be surprising to see the build quality suffer too.
Lol knew it was only a matter of time before bambu did something stupid. Always had a funny feeling about them in the back of my head, like too good to be true.
Never go proprietary when great open source alternatives exist, honestly people who bought Bambu deserve what they’re gonna get.
I just got their new 3d printer and was having a great time with it… Won’t be updating firmware or buying anymore products with them until they fix this
Are you also preventing it from automatically getting an update?
They don’t automatically update.
Unless that’s something new, mine has never updated automatically, it always asks me.
Rossman pointed out that they said they’re going to stop you from printing if you don’t upgrade the firmware. Maybe a timeout built in?
According to the bambulab blog (on the official bambulab website) they explicitly state that you are free to downgrade or not upgrade and your printer will still work.
Edit: they even have a specific note about users that never want to upgrade and it states that it is fine, and their printers will still function.
Their TOS seem to state otherwise, if the screenshot in Louis’ video is to be believed. Looks like they are keeping themselves an option
I can’t believe nobody saw this coming.
Jesus guys what did u expect.
It’s still worth warning those who are on the market for a printer and don’t know.
plenty of us saw this coming.
it’s why we don’t have bambus.
Exactly. When purchasing any modern device I ask myself as to how much a company can screw me if they turn hostile out of nowhere. If I can’t handle that risk, I don’t purchase that product. Not having open source firmware that’s connected to the internet is a huge red flag.
I was about to pick up an a1 mini. Are there alternatives for beginners in that price range?
All other alternatives in that price range you will need to tinker a lot more with. Just a fyi
Check creality’s offerings. I’m happy with my ender v2, and it was about $130…before I started sinking a bunch of money into the hobby lolzzzzz
I love my elegoo neptune 3 pro. I don’t know how they compare though.
