- cross-posted to:
- 3dprinting@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- 3dprinting@lemmy.ml
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thank you for making me aware of this, and thank fuck for louis rossman. no idea how we deserve that guy. as a new BL printer owner, I just opened a complaint on their websites support portal, as advised by this reddit post
Open source followers: what are bambulabs fans wondering about? It was clear from the beginning that closed source would end up like this and that the buyers would massively harm the open source community and the 3d print community.
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
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.
I can’t believe nobody saw this coming.
Jesus guys what did u expect.
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.
It’s still worth warning those who are on the market for a printer and don’t know.
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?
Their implementation of RFID is closed source iirc.
I was worried that Bambu would try to pull the same crap that Dymo did with their label printers.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
If they ever advertised a use case for it, then took that use case away, they can be sued. My most recent memory if the class action against Sony when they dropped Linux support on the PS3.
A lawsuit would be the cost of doing business. They’ll raise prices by $10 to make up the loss. For reference, Sony sold 87.4 million PS3’s at a $500 each. That’s $43 Billion dollars. Sony had to pay a grand total of $3.75 million to settle the suit. That’s 0.007% of sales.
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.
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
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.
I have no regrets with my fine European Prusa printers.
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.
Prusa for the win yet again. I recently upgraded to MK4, and the thing just keeps. On. Going. Great customer support. They work with 3rd party suppiers instead of against them. Worth every cent.
Yep, and the fact you can upgrade to new versions is amazing, only paying for the new parts, not a whole new printer.
I had a side gig as the printer mechanic for a small company that 3D printed bracketry for their product. They used both genuine and “knockoff” (open source ftw) Prusa Mk3s. I’d kinda like to staple Josef Prusa’s foreskin to the ceiling. I think it would make him have better ideas than the extruder-and-hot-end-assembly that those machines currently have. Deal breaking issues I’ve had with them in service:
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Nothing is connectorized at the business end. If you need to replace either of the two fans, the extruder motor, the PINDA probe, the temperature sensor, the heater cartridge, you have to partially disassemble the extruder mechanism and unwrap the wiring harness. The filament runout sensor is connectorized at the tiny little board, but…
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The wiring harness passes through a hole in the back of the carriage plate and most of the wires have to fit into one of two little slots as the extruder mechanism is attached to the carriage. It’s really easy to pinch or sever wires like this, and it means you can’t replace a broken fan or something without partial disassembly.
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The PINDA probe mount is about 3 planck lengths thick. It’s subject to some load from the thickness of the PINDA probe’s cable, it’s rather near the hot end and the heat plate, so I’ve seen them warp or break under continuous use. And it’s built into a foundational part of the mechanism so it’s not a quick swap, it’s a 100% teardown and rebuild from scratch.
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The whole thing is a demented sandwich with like 25 printed plastic parts. It’s a convoluted thing to work on, even if it’s not printed in gloss black so you can make out the shape of everything. But they print it in gloss black.
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It’s not designed to be built up as an assembly that can be easily and quickly attached and detached from the printer. In service, this makes it impossible to have a spare extruder assembly built up so when you get “Number 3 needs a new nozzle” you can swap in the spare assembly, return the machine to service, and then work on the part at your leisure. No, the production manager is breathing down your neck with a machine in many pieces. Hand me my stapler, I just want to talk to him.
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Those goddamn pressed in square nuts. If you want to re-use the hardware because one of the many plastic pieces partially broke in a way that means you HAVE to replace it, re-using the hardware is just one more jumper cable to the cornea.
It’s not specific to the Extruder mechanism, but because nothing is connectorized at the business end, you end up having to open the main board’s enclosure and dealing with shit in there, and there isn’t room. It’s turned the wrong way; the connectors and shit should be on the OUTSIDE of the printer so you could get to them easier and most of the cover should hinge or bolt off.
For an 8-bit AVR-based Mendel pattern machine they work surprisingly well when they’re in good shape but they are a PAIN IN THE TAINT to keep running in a production environment. I have the skills to do better than this but I’m not doing it for free.
Ouchie. OK, I get all that, not gonna argue.
But I’m in a completely different position as a hobbyist, I have completely different criteria.
Thanks for sharing!
Some of this I think still goes for hobbyists if they plan to buy the printer as a kit. The first (of like, eight) Prusas I built I had a hell of a time assembling the extruder mech because it’s not designed to be easy or sane to assemble, I still pinched wires, not bad enough to break anything but still. And I had built several 3D printers and a couple laser engravers prior to this.
And that PINDA probe mount is still hilariously delicate.
As a hobbyist machine that will spend most of its time powered off, they’re fine. For their gantry mechanism and the 8-bit control board, they’re surprisingly high quality if slightly slow printers.
Oh there’s another thing: The Prusa community is in the bad habit of sharing G-Code rather than STLs, because everyone everywhere has the same printer, right?
My personal printer is still my first manually leveled Folger 2020 i3 with some customization of mine, and I don’t need another.
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I’m infuriated by this change, but I’m also frustrated because they really are very good printers. There’s a reason so many people bought them and they became so popular, they are very very good.
But this change is utter bullshit, I won’t be upgrading my firmware any time soon.
As Rossman points out, they said they’ll stop you from printing if you don’t upgrade your firmware.
It’s insane.
They can fucking try.
I’m curious: what will you do then?
It’s already possible to make the printer work entirely offline but even if by some stroke they were able to disable them anyway, I’d sell it in a heartbeat.
No, they didn’t. They explicitly said that you’re free to not upgrade for now in the announcement.
They have a section in their TOS that says they can block you from using the printer if you don’t upgrade, which sucks, but that is a generic clause, doesn’t mean they’ll make use of that here, and from their communication I don’t suspect they will, at least for the time being.
Well this is… disappointing. I picked up an A1 at the end of last year because it “just works”, and I was tired of fighting my Ender 3 instead of actually printing with it. I’m extraordinarily happy with the quality of the printer itself, but I’ll be refraining from updating the firmware I guess, as I don’t allow it to use cloud services, and it lives on my LAN as the only means of management.
I was considering a Bambu till this…what are good alternatives. Within $3k
Prusa and Qidi are 2 places to start.
I was looking at Bambu but now it’s Qidi for me.
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
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
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.
They’re run by a bunch of former DJI execs, the spy drone company.
100% spy drone.
But the best that there is (so far).
Yeah that’s what kept me off Bambu printers right off the bat when I started looking at brands I’d want to get months ago.
