It is completely doable, and there's a lot of good software and tutorials to get it done. But there's all sorts of things that could complicate that process. F

It is completely doable, and there's a lot of good software and tutorials to get it done. But there's all sorts of things that could complicate that process. For instance, with my last 3d printer, I had to open it up and jump some pins on the mainboard, and then had to get a specific piece of (cheap and readily available) USB hardware to write to it from a laptop - and even then, it only worked from a specific USB port on some of my machines, because of weird USB host incompatibilities. And my 3d printer was one of the most common buy-this-one-first products of its time! Oh, and there was also some weirdness with the PSU as well that somehow caused flakiness when powering up the webcam when I tried to share power for the pi with the printer itself. I'm comfortable with troubleshooting that, but I wouldn't expect nor even want the average person to have to bother with that kind of stuff. So the appeal/marketing of the Bambu products is that it's not something for tinkerers - it's something that the average person can just setup and immediately get reliable prints, with all the bells and whistles on top of it. In other words, the idea is that it (quite literally) "just works". Even with the drawbacks that we all know about proprietary devices and cloud services, it does its job for the average person. The positive side of all this is that Bambu's relative success means a bit of pressure on the other leaders in the 3D printing space, and we can see that they're all iterating quickly and well to compete in aspects where they may have been resting on their laurels before.