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’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.
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.
If you were buying Bambu you already didn’t care about this
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Leopards ate your face. May open source thrive
They’re run by a bunch of former DJI execs, the spy drone company.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
I was worried that Bambu would try to pull the same crap that Dymo did with their label printers.
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.
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.
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.
I’m still on an ender 3
Well, I don’t own my own printer yet, and I plan on buying Prusa because they’re (still mostly) open-source and respect the user, even though every Tom, Dick and Harry tells me to get a Bambu printer because they’re three times cheaper and better.
This is why I won’t get a Bambu printer.
They’re not open source anymore. You can’t be mostly open source, you either are or are not.
IMO they started exactly the same path Bambu goes (though Bambu has a great head start).
I admit this is speculation, but I got the impression that Prusa is moving away from open source because they’re salty about other companies cloning their products and selling them much cheaper than the “original” parts. Proprietary parts, patents, etc. is of course worse for the user than a fully open ecosystem, but he isn’t necessarily going full anti-consumer.
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.
