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Prusa are pretty much plug and play these days, especially the Core One line-up.

You're right that they're expensive but you get free human support 24x7, you get an open platform, lots of contributions to open source (even Bambu Studio is a fork of Prusa Slicer), and they pretty much go on forever.

My Core One+ started its life as an original MK3 and went through each iteration of upgrades, and it works like new. I'm now waiting for an INDX upgrade for it.

IMO the main drawback of consumer Prusa offerings is the lack of good chamber heating for more advanced materials. I can print PC on my Core One+ in the summer with the chamber at 45℃ (good enough for most uses, but 60 would be better), but in the winter it becomes a lot harder.

The Core One L is supposedly better in that regard but I've seen reports that it's still not ideal.

Other than that, I feel the extra cash pays itself back in the long run.

Prusa is still the most 'open source-ish' choice, but they're no longer a polar opposite to Bambu, in 2023 they started making efforts to stop commercialization of their designs, stopped sharing source/design material for their PCBs, etc.

Then in 2025 they changed their 'open community license' to say users may not:

“Sell complete machines or remixes based on these files, unless you have a separate agreement…” and “The Restriction: You cannot commercially exploit the design files…”

https://blog.prusa3d.com/core-one-cad-files-release-under-th...

Maybe this is more a comment on how open source has had to change in the face of commercial exploitation of the vulnerabilities traditional open source licenses create for the businesses doing the R&D.

If you decide to get a Bambu anyway, let me heartily recommend against an H2D.

It did "just work" for a while, but then the print cooling fan went bad. On my home Voron, this would be a 5 minute fix. On the H2D, it is this [0]. You basically have to take the entire toolhead apart, removing the mainboard inside it with no less than 11 very tiny and fragile custom ribbon cables that connect to it, plus 5 more connections on a second board that goes on top of it. Most minor fixes are like this. Another time, I had to remove a stuck piece of filament, which involved taking apart the whole front of the toolhead and dealing with even smaller and more fragile flex PCBs.

[0] https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/h2/maintenance/replace-cooling-...

I don’t know if bambu is easier than Prusa. Bought myself a Prusa core one, having absolutely no idea whatsoever what is 3D printing, plugged in, the included filament in, just as the 10 pages manual says, click click, and I made my first print (no internet connection, no wifi, no registration, no app).

Then I installed the app (open source in github) and started using the “cloud” services. I consider myself pretty stupid with such things, and it was absolutely the easiest thing I’ve done in 10 years.

The price is very high though. But at least you OWN the damn thing.

I have an Elegoo Centauri Carbon which is cheaper than Bambu Lab's and it has been plug and play so far. I have no experience with 3D Printing and I've been printing on it without any problems so far.

>They're an excellent company, and the complete opposite of Bambu when it comes to Openness.

not really -- but there ARE total open printers out there. voron and ratrig come to mind.

prusa decided to change a lot of ethics once they became 'big'.[0]

[0]: https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-prin...

I have a P1S. Putting it together and running it was about IKEA level of difficulty. Very easy. If money weren’t a problem, which Prusa printer comes closest (assuming we’d want something like the Bambu AMS2)?

Given how I'm not sure there are 2D printers that really "just work" and don't throw opaque hard to track down errors at random - I actually like open 3D printers that do break, but you can be sure any issue is fixable & you will learn something new in the process. :)

Isn't this just a Bambu marketing point? I have a Prusa MK4S and a Centauri Carbon - they both print without any fuss and can be operated without any deep technical understanding.

Last time I checked you don’t have to pay that much more for a Prusa than a similar spec Bambu printer.

And in any case, Bambu’s well-publicized abuse of open source has driven me off of ever using their printers. I know that only nerds care about this, so I hope Prusa keeps pushing to build a straightforwardly better product.

I'm still rocking my Ender 3 Pro, I printed a part 13 hrs straight and it came out fine

not saying it can't be better eg. faster, multi-color/material but yeah works for me right now with Cura

Creality has printers that are straight-up clones of the Bambu printers and are just as easy to use, but they've historically been somewhat okay at working in the open source ecosystem, unlike Bambu.

Prusa is, of course, the gold standard, and their more recent printers are super easy to use, too.

what can bamboo actually do to lock this down?

are they making their own actuators that communicate with some encryption?

if i buy a bamboo and i dont like it, can i not just cut out all the electroincs and put whatever the new dev board of the day is and flash standard 3d printing firmware on it and send it through a calibration run?

I have an Anycubic Kobra 3 V2 and it “just works”. It’s a Bambu clone but with much less safeguards (for now) and is also 1/3 the price

Dusting off my HN credentials to plug Qidi.

If you can afford to pay more for less printer, get a Prusa Core One. I almost did, but at the time the cost would have included four months of waiting, and that was just too much.

But the Qidi Plus 4 has been just a beast for me. It had some growing pains, and the Internet is forever, so if you read up on it you'll see some scary-looking problems involving the heating element which have been completely fixed for more than a year. From everything I've been able to determine, the QC issues with the Plus 4 are over, and the newer printers like the Q2 and Max 4 have never had them.

I think the intersection of "reads HN" and "needs that tiny delta of convenience between Bambu and Qidi" is empty, basically. Qidi are good open source citizens, and you get a lot of bang for your buck, especially handling high-temp filaments. It's _possible_ to print nylon and ABS on Bambu hardware, but realistically you want something a little better.

Also they're cheaper than Bambu. Thought that was worth mentioning as well.

I'd seriously consider the Snapmaker U1 also, but not the K2 Plus. For one thing, Creality has had to be bullied several times to meet GPL obligations, and I don't like to reward that kind of behavior. For another, the Qidi Max4 is bigger, prints hotter, is more precise, and costs less. Pareto improvement on the K2 Plus.

I'm holding out on the Snapmaker because a) my Qidi Plus 4 is a great piece of hardware and at only 700 hours it's got a lot of life left in it, and b) The Prusa + Bondtech INDX is right around the corner. That's probably going to be my next printer. I find the waste and extreme slowness of AMS-style multimaterial too distasteful to invest in, and I think that entire paradigm will end up in the dustbin as tool-changing consumer FDM matures.

I’ve gotten some really good prints with a Qidi Q1 Pro. Have read good reviews about some of the other/newer versions by the same brand as well. They are very cheap for the features they have, and excellent quality

My P1P at my work is having wifi issues. I'm considering just getting a Core 1, mostly because it has an ethernet port.

Yeah I'm in the market for printer and this just reinforces I should just buy Bambu because literally everything else will be nightmare to use.

But FWIW I'll be transiting China in few months time so will be interesting to see what they sell there.

Chinese printers, like Chinese drones, Chinese PV equipment, and Chinese electric cars are inexpensive but that's because the Chinese Communist Party loves to pick winners.

They subsidise the living heck out of designated national champions, dump oceans of cheap product onto the international market, kill off international competitors, and then seize control of markets. It is neither legal, nor morally defensible.

Want a printer that happens to not be made in China? Good luck. Pay more, or knuckle under, and accept Chinese control of your technology, and increasingly, what you are allowed to say and think.

I don't think Prusa and Bambu compare well. Prusa printers aren't as cleanly designed as Bambu and they are more than twice the price. I consider them really poor value for money. And Bambu printers aren't clones. The AMS is something they came up with.

Also, Prusa copy from Bambu too. Like their own material switcher (much less sophisticated than the AMS) and the new Core printer is really more a Bambu copy than the other way around, honestly. In fact other brands are copying Bambu too.

I really like them, they are fair to me as a consumer. Spare parts are cheap, there's no consumable restrictions or subscriptions for their cloud service.

And they're really as plug and play as you can get right now. I don't really need that, I've owned printers since the first generation so I know how to deal with issues. But really they happen rarely. The worst I get is stuck filament in the AMS and I found I can prevent that by removing the bit of filament with gear bite marks after it's been through. It absorbs more water then and gets brittle.

Also I've learned from earlier printers not to mix materials in the same nozzle so I switch them too.

I think the Bambu social contract is pretty clear:

- they benefit from open source software work

- we benefit from their dirt cheap top performing machines

As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me. They provide insane social value through accessibility. Before them, it was Creality with the Ender 3.

My problem with Pruša as an European is that it turns us into the equivalent of being a Chinese citizen who can't afford the Temu product they make at work. Their machines are priced more or less only for US export, and not really something most people here can reasonably buy. They even refuse to use injection moulding out of some self righteous principle, which drives the price per unit up further all the while selling less durable machines cause they're half RepRap. I take it sort of as a personal insult and I will never buy one even though I can afford it, I see it as bad value. Like buying a gold plated watch or something.

"We forced every user of every printer, worldwide, to interact with their printer through our centralized servers. This caused service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users."

There, I fixed it for you Bambu. You may use it under Creative Commons.

Seems like making the slicer only able to talk to the printer via the cloud was a bad way to do things, where any issue results in “instability felt by all users.”

Do the well-behaving clients really need to use those servers? Could you have done something to avoid this bottleneck for all users?

Yeah, this is a farce.

So am I understanding correctly that all of this "unauthorized traffic" was their customers...using their product?

So technically they just said that their printers would be less popular if Orcaslicer ceased to exist.

I guess if it's a security issue, it's a security issue: https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/10681

A conspiracy-theory steelmanning interpretation of that statement is that Bambu thinks that some unscrupulous Chinese manufacturer is performing DDoS attacks against them, but can't fully and publicly admit to that for legal reasons.

That’s good in theory but there are also plenty of counter examples of companies forcing features and still making it by just sheer brand reputation or market share (HP still has DRM’d ink, Keurig is still going after “hacks”) or just money (OpenAI promised to open source their model).

I’m not saying we shouldn’t shame those companies for not abiding to their words, but there is more to it than outrage. Suing them (or the threat of) might also work here if they really went against the license.

Also, LAN mode is NOT a substitute for the functionality you bought the printer with.

My biggest annoyance is that I can no longer use OrcaSlicer to interact with my printers (e.g. sync filaments) and start prints remotely. I am still very annoyed at Bambu Labs for this stupid move, as it directly impacts my usage.

What most people seem to be missing in these discussions is that some of us have printers in remote workshops, not next to us. So all the "LAN" or "Developer" options aren't great, especially if you have to pick between those OR the cloud.

The only way to put pressure on a company is to buy their competitor's product instead.

The company would prefer that you "put pressure" by getting angry, ranting on social media, and then still buying their product.

And by using AGPL they grant you the license to use the code however you wish, they cannot say it's "unauthorized access".

And they report service disruptions as a result of this - so perhaps they are are also learning what gateways are.

Blaming the CLIENT for this is absolutely crazy.

"You can't use any client you want because of security" is bullshit, as if hackers will care what client you'd like them to use or not when they're trying to hack your infrastructure.

This is just Bambu alienating their customer base, again.

Or it's a really blatant security issue that should be reported https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/10681

Bambu had its requirement to go through their servers since before the Ukraine war, though it has gotten progressively harder to work around.

> A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.

> Now is the chance for us outsiders to help Ukraine, by freeing Bambu firmware.

What you write sounds like an invitation to pro-Russia-minded people to sabotage these free Bambu firmware efforts. :-)

Please provide sources to your claims.

> This firmware replacement will cost a couple of months to write so we all should send that programmer a little money so he/she can release it for free.

> A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.

If that were true, it seems to me, that Ukraine would have already done it if it was somehow standing in their way.

So Ukraine is on the verge to becoming western world supplier of top end drones and 3d printers and we are doing exactly nothing about it?

IMO Ukraine should start exporting their drones (for fun or spooking political adversaries) as a way to help the war effort.

Lot of conspiracy theory and misinformation in this comment.

I'm not up to date with their latest printers, but the Bambu printers used during this timeframe have easy ways to enable LAN only mode. You can leave it disconnected from the network entirely and use an SD card, too.

The app lets you enable root access and install firmware mods. There are multiple efforts to reverse engineer the firmware.

Or just put your file on an sd card and plug it physically into the printer?

Makes fleet management a bit harder but I don’t believe that requires internet access unless I missed some update.

In practice Ukrainians have long moved to custom built drones for pretty much everything.

Picking up 3D printers that don't spy on you, modding them or even building custom ones is much easier than designing and building millions of custom drones, so I am sure they solved this long ago.

Like, really - a FDM printer is just a MCU board with a bunch of stepper drivers, a power supply, some frame, motors, thermistors & heating elements.

"you only had to change one setting on the printer itself, and optionally block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry" - "only" is doing a lot of work here. Yes, this is easy for us, but that part alone is beyond most users.

I have a P1S myself, and I find Bambu to be a strange company. They're one that has benefited tremendously from OSS while sometimes violating both the ethos and licenses.

They specifically engineer it such that your prints need to go through an intermediary even when it could send it right to your device on a simple network. That'd be like a laserjet routing through the cloud instead of going to your device. With nothing much in the way of encrypting your designs and protecting your data, it feels like this was done on purpose. Given the shameless track record of many (most?) Chinese companies on IP, my assumption is that they're mainly doing this to steal designs. The juxtaposition of their poor track record on OSS, what seems like a shady approach to privacy and IP protection, and the aggressive legal posturing - all sum up to what I think is a very untrustworthy organization.

Luckily my designs are in the "look at this trash" territory, so I don't have anything to worry about, but I certainly wouldn't use this for important work.

As far as I can tell, they're just objecting to use of their cloud service. You can fork their software and use it with your own printer just fine, they just don't want you to use it with their cloud service, which its own terms of service for access.

I think it's an odd hill for them to die on, but it's not a totally unreasonable position - the cloud is other people's computers, other people can have rules about what you can do with their computers. Just because a client is open-source, doesn't mean you're allowed to use the server.

If you're using developer mode running everything locally (or remotely over your own VPN, like the author here) then I think this makes zero difference.

Before: user can print via cloud or locally with custom slicer at the same time easier.

Some time in 2025: firmware updates make user choose between cloud XOR locally. Enabling local mode allows using custom slicer, but disables cloud printing or monitoring. Folks were up in arms because they wanted both, and openness.

Latest fork: a specific new custom slicer impersonates UA to submit print via bambu cloud, so it gives the pre-2025 experience.

Bambu sues this new fork. Actual OrcaSlicer working locally is fine.

I'm in a similar boat to you. I understand the current drama, but for my intended use case (an occasional-use tool sitting on a workbench in my garage) LAN mode has been fine and entirely removed from the drama.

I don't want an open source slicer sending prints through their cloud services, because I don't want their cloud services. The value of being able to check on a print or start it from my phone is near-zero. I shoot it off a laptop in my office and check on it intermittently during the print from that same laptop. This has worked fine to-date on my machine, but the concern is clearly that Bambu's corporate interest is not in that use-case, it's getting as much of the ecosystem in-house as possible. They want to control the model side via markerworld, and have everything flow through the cloud.

One doesn't need to assume bad intent, there's pretty clear financial and UX incentives here that mirror a lot of Apple for example. But I don't think I'm out of line for not wanting to move towards that world under a company with Chinese ownership and in an environment where many western lawmakers are pushing for strict control of what the machines can be used for. It's a lot easier to implement DRM, copyright protections, and restrictions on what can be printed in a cloud-only world than one where open source software is sending gcode to a local printer.

I've got no need or intent to replace my machine, but the next one likely won't be a bambu. They're not the only ones who are now making a machine where it works as a tool and you don't need to have 3d printing be your hobby to be productive with it.

My understanding is that you got your printer when the firmware was not blocking you from doing all of that. Right now if you want to remote print (and don't want to do it via sending models to Bambu Cloud), you can get away if you enable LAN only and developer mode. However, what if the newer firmware forces you to create an online account and connect to Bambu cloud to do the setup? What if Bambu decides to limit the features you can use if you print using a SD card? It has been quite a worrying trend, and now the company is trying to legally threaten an open-source developer building on top of Bambu's AGPL code trying to make remote print without going through Bambu servers possible. Other ppl more knowledgeable on the issue, please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the situation.

> IIRC, you only had to change one setting on the printer itself, and optionally block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry

Why do you have to do that on a product you own that is running in your home?

Well you are still supporting a company that is turning out to be objectively more and more evil & need to do crazy stuff that would be insanity for any other 3D printer ("block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry").

That automatically disqualifies Bambulab from my PoV.

You're obviously not an open source advocate or zealot if you gave up your principles so easily.

Did you install the network connector Orca slicer prompted you to download? It's a closed source blob that runs on your PC which I'm presuming you haven't air-gapped as well.

Can you freely download firmware and update the printer offline?

> I'm not sure I'm clear on what the kerfuffle is about.

Perhaps the kerfuffle is about making legal threats against open source developers.

People just want to bitch online about printers not being open enough while they type their comments from their fully closed and locked down phones.

Prusa wrote an article about that:

https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...

In short, these Chinese companies are pushed by the state, in essentially massive dumping. And not only that, they get Chinese hardware patents granted on open inventions from the wider 3D printing community as their own creation & then try to push those spurious patents also in the West.

Great points. Using their printer "rooted" or with custom firmware seems like a decent compromise to me, kind of like what graphene is doing with pixels

They had that chance to create proper auth and api for years and many developers and myself have been asking for it. Never happened, and I suspect will never happen.

The license isn't the issue. It's the User Agreement. Bambu is claiming that the fork is allowing, enabling, (and/or promoting, encouraging, etc) users to violate the agreement with Bambu to not use their cloud with third party software.

I'm fairly certain user agreements have been used for suing makers of game cheats and other similar things. Certainly in the industry I work in, there was a company making third party software and integrating it with the industry standard tool without going through the official channels, which caused people to violate the user agreement when used. They got sued and settled.

Another way to read it is that they are shifting blame away from their backend - which is so shitty that it experiences notable service disruptions when some of their existing users send unexpected headers - onto the client software.

Your fridge became dependent on updates. Then they added ads to front panel. Then they'll say that you need a subscription to use holiday mode. Then it no longer receives update and touch panel stops working because it can't connect to servers and you'll need to buy a new one or buy an upgraded touch panel for $99 instead of $199 if you'll buy it this week.

Well, I too, don't have anything against a company selling a "good but not open printer", and I don't care if my fridge is open.

However, I hope you see that the behavior reported by Jeff here is just bad. They are either not understanding open source licenses or are acting in bad faith.

The issue is not that they sell 3d printers with proprietary software. The issue is altering the deal _after_ you have purchased the printer. People bought a printer that was open. Then suddenly the company changed their mind and pushed an update that made it non open. And when people try to restore the software to the state it was when bought, the company fights such attempts with dmca requests. If I bought something it's mine and I can do whatever I want with it and run whatever software I want on it.

Then you sound like the type of client that perfectly fits Bambu's profile. Now, don't come complaining when Bambu decides you need a monthly subscription to use the slicer, or whatever rent-seeking they come up with in the future. Remember, you are paying extra for the privilege of not thinking, and you bought into that arrangement fully aware.

>I don't care if my 3d printer is "open"

Yet! Enshittification is a given, even if not premeditated. Finding open solutions now is proper planning.

I don't want my refrigerator or my table saw to require a server connection to China either, though.

If there were no 'open' 3D printers there would be no Bambu Lab.

Yeah .. nah. Bang for the buck the Bambu mashines are just really good. And X2D even has a heated chamber. If you don't have the cash for a Prusa, but want similar levels of "just works"™ there sadly are not many options.

I mean I print ASA with my Voron, but that is build it yourself and high level of tinkering.

There are alternatives like QIDI Q2. But .. it will probably not be as fire and forget as Prusa or Bambu.

> Somebody at their company saw a fork with their own company name on it, impersonating their own client auth code, and sent a C&D.

I would doubt this is the case, Orca Slicer exists since 2022 and is very popular. This is not a "somebody just noticed a thing" situation.

Orcas Slicer is a fork of Bambu Studio, which is a fork of PrusaSlicer, itself a descendant of Slic3r.

Orca Slicer was forked to improve usability and features, not to get around any cloud printing requirements, Bamboo added those later and removed the ability to print locally.

It has to impersonate to transfer a gcode file locally, which is another open standard.

Bamboo restricted LAN printing, that is the issue.

> OrcaSlicer-bambulab: if the goal of this fork-of-a-fork is to bypass Bambu's cloud servers, why would it still need to "impersonate" the UA and communicate with Bambu's servers (as Bambu claimed)? Wouldn't the whole point be to avoid doing that in the first place?

I finally got to the bottom of this; there is a cloud-based RPC method called `bambu_network_start_local_print` where Bambu's Cloud would authorize a print using (ostensibly) only locally transferred data. The goal of this project was basically to pretend to be the Bambu plugin in order to authorize this method, which is otherwise locked behind Bambu's auth system.

The alternative is to run the printer in LAN mode (which OrcaSlicer has always supported) where the client connects natively over MQTT, but after Bambu added their cloud authentication, this requires putting the printer in Developer mode and severing the Cloud features.

Bambu has the slicer (orca, bambu) download a plugin (owned and written by bambu, closed source.) which is what the controversy is about.

Orcaslicer is a perfectly legal fork, and in the past downloaded the official (closed source) binary blob to talk to the servers.

Bambu doesn’t want to serve people who reverse engineer the new (again, closed source) binary blob.

All of this being about the AGPL is just disingenuous ragebaiting.

You hook it up to the network to use monitoring features like a remote camera view to make sure your print is going smoothly.

SD cards work but it's extremely less convenient than just printing straight from the slicer.

You can use any slicer you want but Bambu wants only their slicer to directly connect.

CLI slicing is not something you want in general. Visual confirmation of the toolpaths is very important to making prints as successful as possible.

If they don't want to provide free cloud services in perpetuity they could make their 3D printers work offline without restrictions.

Why should people be forced to distance themselves from their public service work in order to be safe from abuse?

Another aspect is that releasing something under copyleft without putting an identity behind it is toothless. Someone can copy it and now if you want to go after them, you need to out yourself anyway.

The printer firmware is proprietary, cannot be easily changed anymore, and does certificate pinning for the cloud functionality. LAN mode does not expose the same functionality as the cloud.

> What printers are similarly priced and have similar specs, for someone relatively new to 3D printing?

None, really. Prusa printers are good enough though. If you value freedom and privacy, its worth a few extra dollars.

Without the AMS, a Prusa Mk4 (used?) You're always going to pay a bit more but they're European built and extremely repairable. Unfortunately you do need to pay for the Mk4 or Core to match Bambu's ease of use. The Mini is also great for occasional use if you don't need a big build volume.

The Mk3 is also easy, and can be had for cheap now, but it doesn't have auto Z-adjust which is really nice. It's also noticeably slower compared to the latest models.

Creality K2 Combo[1] is pretty much spec for spec a P2S. Add in OrcaSlicer (Bamboo Slicer fork), and you basically have a non-closed system P2S. I've printed 652 hours on it since December, about 4.7km worth of filament has been ran through it. Great upgrade over the Creality K1 that is sitting next to it.

[1] https://store.creality.com/products/k2-k2-combo-3d-printer-l...

Eleego Centauri Carbon is cheaper and is just plug and play. I have no experience with 3D printing and have been using it for a while with no problems or messing around with the printer.

Most printers these days will give you good performance when you buy them. Bigger issue is how reliable it'll be after you put 1000 hours on it. Bambu Lab is the best in that regard, but many other brands will give you the results you want, you'll just need to become good at troubleshooting.

Check out the qidi q2 (or the q2c depending on what you plan to print) - it reviews well compared to the p2s or even the x1c, runs fully open firmware, and is a fair bit cheaper than the bambu comparables.

I've been told about the Snapmaker U1, but I haven't tested it. More expensive than a Bambu but cheaper than a Prusa (I think)

Prusa: Probably less reliable/weaker UX, but good enough. Raise3D: Similar reliability, but more expensive.

Prusa, but it's more expensive.

Some managers are fine screwing power users when they feel they are big enough. I will never buy a Chamberlain garage door opener for their similar stance against the Home Assistant community

I am sufficiently paranoid that I think this is drone part detection from the Chinese government.

Ya at this point I mainly know Bambu from their adversarial behavior. Some friends and I put three new printers online this past month and proudly none are Bambulabs.

Do they? They came to the realisation that they control a sufficient fraction of the market that your preference as a consumer no longer matters to them.

This feels like pressure from the state. I do not see why they would do this otherwise. If people use these printers at work, they may be willingly sending prototypes and designs to China. That would create a huge advantage, because the company could know who bought the printer, where they are located, and what they are working on. Since Chinese companies are required to comply with the government, corporate espionage seems like the most logical explanation to me.

I bought one a few months back when it was weirdly cheap (£260 delivered!) and it's been really very solid. I've only had a couple of issues:

1. One of the bed temperature sensors reported a fault, this was a loose connection and took about 10 minutes to open and reseat, which was nice

2. I sometimes get an error in Chinese that blocks a print and requires pressing a continue button on the touchscreen. I've tried translating this and I have no idea what it's on about, so if anyone does know what it is then lemme know. Doesn't cause me much trouble though

Overall I'm really pleased with it - it's pretty much a bargain. Mine has never been connected to the internet and very rarely has print failures (and they're nearly all my fault when I have had them). I've ordered the multi-filament addon which they've just announced, and I was pleased to see them offer that as an upgrade for purchasers of the first model.

I have the original CC. It’s a fine budget machine for single color - plenty fast and good quality prints.

They rubbed people the wrong way launching the CC2 with multi-color support before they developed the multi-color add-on that was promised for the original CC. I didn’t plan on multi-color with the CC, so that didn’t personally bother me too much.

I recently got a Snapmaker U1 for multi-toolhead prints and love it so far - much less waste than a filament changer and I’m using it for more exotic prints like a mix of conductive and regular PLA in a single part that wouldn’t work well in a filament changer single toolhead printer.

And I still use my CC for occasional single color prints (recently it’s been dedicated to TPU but I’m probably going to move that over to the U1 so I can do “over molded” TPU+PLA prints).

In short, if you’re willing to spend more I’d highly recommend the U1 if you know you’d benefit from the toolchanger. CC is probably a fine budget machine but there are a lot of other similar budget corexy machines to consider these days as well (I got CC when it was groundbreaking for features at its price but competition has caught up by now).

Yeah i got a CC1 due to price alone (Prusa was out of my range but obviously vastly preferred), and then they started trying to pull bullshit with firmware. They backed off after outrage, but don't forget that this is exactly what Bambu initially tried to do - so it will be the first and last Elegoo that I purchase.

Printer is great though. I've never used a Bambu, but after a thorough round of Orca calibration this (at the time) newbie was able to get some really decent PCTG and even PA-CF prints.

Web interface can't hold a stable video stream.

I bought it a few months ago and as a beginner in 3D printing it has been really nice. I haven't printed that much though but so far it's been really good.

Apple is building things in house and closed source. They also don't throw their weight around with small developers like this.

This article isn't about the fact that Bambu has a walled garden. They're slandering and suing an OSS developer for using open source code that Bambu published. And the reason Bambu publishes open source code is because they're heavily reliant on the open source community.

I agree their printers are good, and good printers help the market, but this behavior is unconsciounable and needs to have consequences.

> 3d printing tech is obviously dual-use.

Is it though?

? They are a Chinese company

I have multiple Bambu printers, and I've had no problems at all with AMS or AMS2 pro. It just works for me, even with all kinds of weird filaments. Not saying you're wrong, but my experience has been flawless.

I think it's more disingenuous to call "trying to ruin a guy's life" "mishandling the situation". Also

* user agent spoofing has been common practice on the web for decades * Bambu's customers were bait and switched here. They bought a printer that works locally, and Bambu wants to remove features from the product they paid for. And it's the _customer_ who's actually running this slicer and impersonating Bambu.

Imagine if you bought a car with Carplay/Android Auto. A year later, the manufacturer pushes an OTA update that locks Carplay behind a subscription. But they have terrible security, just trusting the car itself to say if it has a subscription, so you use use pirate software to bypass the restriction and get free Carplay.

This is a far more financially damaging outcome for the car manufacturer, closer to stealing than user agent impersonation, but I would still argue that its morally justified. Consumers should have a right to fight rug-pulls, especially a physical product. This behavior from companies would never have been acceptable before the internet.

> being cloud-first. The reality is that 99% of their users set up the printer and app using the cloud service

Part of me thinks that the particular kind of enshittification we've come to see with devices, where something that certainly needs no cloud has a hard cloud dependency baked in, is partly an accident of the networking environment everything has grown up in.

When broadband and then especially Wi-Fi caught on, using NAT was so practical, solving both the "how do we properly configure a firewall to only route good traffic" problem, and the "we don't have enough routable IPs for every smart toaster or baby monitor to get one."

Only after this reality and assumption had been completely baked into every home network and the devices used to build those networks, then we started to see IoT devices, which really benefit from remote access. Companies added cloud because it was the only way to make that work - and most of them didn't want to implement and support a different protocol for LAN usage when that wouldn't sell any more devices.

I wonder if we had started out with ipv6 before the wi-fi boom happened, and every device had a routable address, and wi-fi routers always had good firewalls, and UPNP had not launched with immediate security issues... I wonder if we would have seen much more direct connectivity enabled by companies who given the choice, would rather sell a device that didn't need anything from them to support, instead of a device they're obligated to run servers for (at least for a few years).

> we need to stop vilifying companies for being cloud-first.

No. Absolutely not. Cloud-first is privacy-second, and rental model with ever-changing fees and terms of use.

Don't forget that you are having the cloud hosted services generate and send executable code to a device inside your corporate firewall. I can see all kinds of potential issues corporate security would have just based on that fact alone.

Yes, very common use case. I print things remotely from home on the printers at the office all the time, as do many of my colleagues. Probably not a common use case for people with at-home printers, but if you use them professionally people do it all the time. That said, you probably don't want bambu's cloud if you're working on protected IP...

Closer to 200C. But the gantry constraints movement, the 200C nozzle can only really touch its holder, the print bed, the filament and some metal or silicon cleaning surfaces. None of those are flamable at those temps.

Maybe if it knocks itself down to the ground? But I worry much more about faulty wiring or stuff like that. And that's more a function of the brand and model

I would have never done this 10 years ago with the garbage printers that were pieced together like science projects rather than finished products.

But a modern enclosed bambu printer is a much better engineered device. Bambu is mature enough as a company that they've issued formal recalls for device issues before. This would never happen with the aliexpress specials that used to dominate the market.

Bambu printers (and other reputable modern printers) are being run unattended at scale all the time without issue.

That isn’t a significantly different risk from how you are required to use a FDM printer, regardless of circumstance.

Prints regularly take ten+ hours to complete. No one is vigilantly guarding their printer during this time. Fire spreads so quickly in a house that a smoke alarm is often just a signal to get out, you don’t necessarily have the time to grab a fire extinguisher and put it out.

And how big is the risk, really? The materials that you use do not ignite so close to their melting point.

3D printers aren't the fire hazards of yore. They're quite reliable, fused, with multiple interlocks for various conditions (mainly around heating not matching expected rate) that will kill power.

The main potential problem these days (in my view) is whether a print finishes without crashing or delaminating from the print plate, which also has workarounds... but that's only potential printer damage, not a fire.

Pretty common for us to leave the printer unattended. The prints are 8 h or more at times and I’m definitely not watching the device. During that time I might be asleep or out of the house. I’ve never actually started a print from outside but that’s not from a safety standpoint just I’ve never needed to.

At worst the sprinklers above it will wash it but that’s in a catastrophic instance.

My P1S has a camera built into it. If the print begins to fail, I can stop the printer and turn off the heat immediately before anything spirals. Very easy and convenient to remote control from my phone.

Does your house have an HVAC system? Water heater?

These people exist.

I do this occasionally, but am fine with using Bambu's integrated Slicer and Remote Control software. It works well enough.

I don't know, do people exist who will run 220 V wiring through their house, even though a few mm of plastic separate the two wires from conflagration? Who use devices running on thousands of volts, with mere inches separating their hands from death?

Perhaps one or two.

That's what homeowner's insurance is for. I often run my printer when I'm not home.

I don't run prints when I'm not home. I have a fire suppression system in my H2S, and I had one with my A1. You only need it to fuck up once, and your house is toast.

I think this sort of person definitely exists

There are people who are simply careless

There are people who think of the 3d printer as a toy, not as a piece of industrial (or semi industrial) equipment

There are people who are arrogant, who think they have figured out and solved anything that could possibly go wrong so they have made it safe to do

There are people who kind of think they are invincible and are just convinced that bad stuff won't happen to them

Idk. It's not a stretch at all for me to imagine this sort of person, based on the people I've met in the past. I mean people remove safety guards from power saws that are designed to protect you from losing fingers, so...

The plugin wasn't reverse engineered. The interface with the plugin was AGPL so you can freely use it in any other AGPL software.

IANAL

> Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.

The GPLv3 specifically was written to address a problem called "TiVo-ization", which is when a hardware vendor uses some trick (DRM, proprietary blobs, whatever) to prevent users from actually running modified versions of the software.

The AGPL, the license of this particular software, extends the GPLv3 with protections for users of network services:

> Simply put, the AGPLv3 is effectively the GPLv3, but with an additional licensing term that ensures that users who interact over a network with modified versions of the program can receive the source code for that program. In both licenses, sections four through six provide the terms that give users the right to receive the source code of a program.

https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2021/fall/the-fundamentals-of-t...

And on TiVo-ization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

The Linux and proprietary drivers situation is more complicated, but proprietary drivers on Linux are generally restricted to interfaces that Linux chooses to expose to them for that purpose. But the Linux kernel seems to take a narrower view of what constitutes a derivative work than was likely intended by the FSF in writing the GPL. Under a "traditional" reading of the GPL, those proprietary drivers are meant to be illegal. Whether some or all of the linking done by proprietary drivers in the Linux kernel is really allowed by the GPL or not is somewhat untested, I think.

You have LAN mode only because everyone was up in arms the first time. LAN mode was not part of the plan at first and Bambulab was forced to offer after “listening to their customer”.

> It also feels like bad framing as well because every post I see about this thing really tries to blur the line and claim this plugin and orca slicer are one and the same.

Doesn't it sounds weird to you? I mean, what the reason they have to blur the line? Are they just clueless? Or maybe they fight for some political reason, like an anti-corporate stance, and Bambu is just a convenient target for them?

I'm asking, what you think of them, because I can't understand you. Your take on the conflict is incompatible with behavior of the people opposing Bambu. Or rather it leaves no good explanations for their behavior. When I notice it, I start digging, because if the situation doesn't have a good explanation, it means I do not understand the situation. But you just accept your understanding, so you have some good explanation for people's behavior?

> Their slicer is open source but it downloads a plugin once you launch it if you choose to which is closed sourced that interacts with their APIs.

It is very dubious way to subvert GPL, even GPL2, not to mention [A]GPL3.

It was discussed many times that you cannot have close-sourced plugin for GPL host program, as loading plugin is linkage and it is covered by full GPL (only LGPL has linkage exclusion).

Everyone is up in arms because this is not the first shady thing bambulab does (like patenting prior art). And probably not the last.

> I don't really see why everyone is up in arms about this. You are able to print in LAN mode or directly through USB drives without going through bambus servers.

This is in no way equivalent. You can't sync filaments, you can't monitor printers in your slicer, you can't monitor prints from your phone. This is like going backwards at least 5 years.

I find this shallow take really annoying, as it tends to derail most discussions ("you have LAN mode, so what are you complaining about").

Regardless of the license if they only want their own software interacting with their cloud API, I don't really care because USB and LAN are there. That is ample ability to interact with the machine.

Plenty of situations would make me feel differently, but I'm fine with their restrictions in this case.

> I don't understand why any software other than their own should be entitled to use those resources

That's not a genuine argument, nobody "feels entitled" to anything. Bambu made a deliberate choice to architect the product this way, deliberately placed themselves in this gatekeeping position, and they're deliberately working towards removing any other form of access to our hardware.

"Likes to own" implies "cannot always own".

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

does his phone/laptop choice detract from the points being made in the post regarding bambu?

From watching his videos, he's an Apple guy for his personal devices, though his server infrastructure (and also the bulk of the devices he reviews and experiments with ) are Linux machines.

I'm guessing a Pixel with GrapheneOS

I like both Jeff and Apple products, but this does seem a pretty ... odd ... thing to say within the context of his audience. A normal person wouldn't bat an eye but the kind of people watching Jeff Geerling videos will probably have some strong opinions about it