7 ms·

EDIT: After some more poking around, I’m finding out that the cloud features of this thing are pretty integral to the experience. This thing looks nice, but th

EDIT: After some more poking around, I’m finding out that the cloud features of this thing are pretty integral to the experience. This thing looks nice, but the enshittification scaffolding is too much. I knew the price was too good. ORIGINAL COMMENT: Wow, I've been out of the 3D printing world for a bit. I have a Monoprice Maker Ultimate (Wanhao D6, rebadged) that has a slightly larger build area, but otherwise it's bare bones on the firmware. I reflashed it with Klipper, and have an Octopi attached to it, but that still requires all sorts of futzing about to get it tuned right. With multi filaments, all the tuning wizardry, and the quick-change nozzle, I might consider this. The big thing that gives me pause is the closed nature of the platform. My current printer might be "just commodity parts" or whatever, but that can be huge plus! This feels very much like deciding whether to join the Apple Ecosystem™ or to stick with a beige box so I can run whatever OS I want. And that isn't an easy choice to make these days.

bmurphy1976 3y ago
I don't love the closed nature of their platform but I love that they are forcing everyone else to step up their game. If Bambu is Apple, who's going to be Android and who's going the way of WebOS/Blackberry/Windows Phone? The next six to twelve months are going to be rough for some companies but we're going to have some incredibly powerful, cost effective, and user friendly machines when it's done.
userbinator 3y ago
It's no surprise that what's been making 2D printing an increasingly horrible experience has also started showing up in 3D too.
foxylad 3y ago
My 3d printing journey seems to have ended with a Prusa Mini. Really solid and well engineered device, and it's delightful that Prusa acknowledge the open-source hardware and software they depended on to build their company. BambooLab... well it is a nice machine, and they have definitely advanced the the field with input shaping. But this machine is pretty much a Prusa Mini with linear rails, and I'd bet there is open-source in their firmware and slicer, but there's no way to find out because their business model is to give nothing back to the ecosystem they have leveraged. That leaves a bad taste for me, but I'm sure many people will be quite happy to ignore such esoteric concerns and happily lock themselves in. Until BambooLab have a bad financial quarter. Then the optional cloud integration will become mandatory with a subscription, and the spool detection system will start reject non-BambooLab filament. Doctorow has struck a chord with his distillation of enshittification, and you are right on the money raising it here. (Meanwhile Prusa has just released input shaping for the Mini.)
- function_seven 3y ago
  The first time I saw the word “enshittification” it just clicked. It really is a tidy word! Do you have any opinion on the Creality K1? Not a technical one, but about their participation in the open community? Another comment in this thread brought it up, and it seems like a great machine.
  - ganoushoreilly 3y ago
    Reality we’re being pretty shady and only acknowledged / released info after the community put up an uproar. The machine performance isn’t bad but I’d still recommend a p1p and just using local lan instead of the cloud. I own two x1cc, and 2 p1p, tons of ender 3 + 5’s, Prusa xl ( it’s a beast but slower than bambu by a decent margin).
- dawnerd 3y ago
  The slicer is open source, there’s a fork called orcaslicer based on it and kept up to date with Prusaslicer changes.
- 2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
  Bambuu forks Prusa Slicer but appears to do the bare minimum to not get called out.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    Prusa Slicer was forked from Slic3r. That's kind of the point of free software; fork it, change the colors, stick your name on it. (Prusa has done a lot more than that, of course.) Frankly, the less software that hardware companies write, the better. They already have their hands full with the firmware and probably don't need to be setting up CI infrastructure for Linux/Mac/Windows and all that stuff.
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    They've been called out for removing credits from merged code by the main developer of OrcaSlicer: https://twitter.com/fever_soft/status/1678262984999837701 https://twitter.com/fever_soft/status/1678262984999837701 . Technically not against licenses, but still.
alsodumb 3y ago
Ahh, classic hackernews upvoting the 'I hate cloud' comment to the top. I have a few Bambu lab printers (perks of being a grad student) and their offline mode is pretty good - there are printers in my lab that are pretty much never connected to internet and print 24/7. Sure, offline mode doesn't have all the features they mention on their website, but even without it, Bambu lab printers are better than their competition by a HUGE margin. I've had all kinds of printers before, including Prusa. Nothing comes close to Bambu lab ones in terms of no non sense printing and cost. Sure, their components aren't open source, but official spares are cheap enough. And they promised to keep them cheap enough. Sure, they can change their word, and guess what? The printer would have made it's money's worth (for personal or commerical use) by the time that happens. You can throw away the printer by that point and you'd have net positive gain. Bambu lab is going to do what DJI did to drones. Period. Every kid is gonna have a 3D printer, every influencer is going to make a 3D printer is cool post, and lots of Christmas gifts are going to be Bambu 3D printers. Bambu lab is former DJI folks - no wonder their product strategy and in some way design language is so close to DJI.
- function_seven 3y ago
  I totally believe that these printers are technically amazing. That’s why I made the Apple vs. beige box analogy. Those M-series chips and their hardware quality are way better. But there is stronger lock-in. I’ve been burned so many times by other products that I think my wariness is more than justified. And I’m not alone, which is why this is “classic”. (But the pricing is really good. I think I’ll wait and see a bit more)
  - blitz_skull 3y ago
    I think this is a valid analogy. Albeit, one that makes me all the more excited to buy a Bamboo. I’ve been a software engineer for a while now and personally I adore Apple’s approach to products. It just works. I don’t have to spend time fucking around with things I don’t want to. And most importantly, IT JUST WORKS. I hate what a pain it is to just get straight lines to print on my 3D printer! It shouldn’t be this hard. Granted, hopefully a swing towards Bamboo will put pressure on the other players in the market and they’ll up their game so that all the non-enthusiasts who just want to print can select from a variety of products.
technick 3y ago
I make things for conferences with 3d printers. I started with Wanhao printers, then went to Aurora Jaguar's... and then Prusa Mk3s's... and now am looking at a mixed print farm of Prusa MK3s and Bambu Labs X1C's. I'm selling the rest of my Prusa printers in the coming months and replacing them with more Bambu's, their product are amazing and 3-4x faster than prusa printers. I love Prusa but they were caught sleeping at the wheel, they stopped innovating until bambu labs woke them up.
jdietrich 3y ago
Bambu printers will accept G-code on a MicroSD card, like basically any 3D printer ever. The cloud stuff is optional, but very useful. I completely understand why people hate Bambu Lab, but I wish they'd understand why other people like them. If you want a new hobby, there are lots of excellent FDM printers on the market. If you just want to print good parts, you'd be a fool to buy anything other than a Bambu. There's just nothing else that will reliably produce dimensionally accurate parts out of the box and for thousands of hours afterwards, with absolutely no tinkering or troubleshooting.
- function_seven 3y ago
  A lot of responses to my comment keep mentioning the amazing technical details of this hardware. I believe it. I am not complaining about the hardware being subpar. That’s not my beef. If I have to schlep an SD card back-and-forth from my laptop to my printer, that’s a crap experience. And for them to block local network uploading—and force you to make an account for that feature—sorry, that is a classic dark pattern. It has a cool video camera built in. But oops!, it can only send a video to our servers, not to you. When companies employ dark patterns like these, it is a signal that I no longer ignore. EDIT: I forgot: > but I wish they'd understand why other people like them. Yeah I get it. Given how many people I’ve seen using these printers rave about them, I do understand how leaps in speed and quality make it worth it. I’m not in as great a need for that personally. But I get it.
  - margor 3y ago
    Sorry but that is just FUD. I own BambuLab and make use of their LAN feature all the time. The camera stream works without account and cloud access (albeit, they recently added that!), so does uploading g-code through the LAN without any account. You _just_ install BambuStudio, connect to the printer with a code shown on it and assuming you're in the same network - it just works. No account or any cloud needed for that.
    - nullc 3y ago
      Yes but it's a fairly recent change. > and assuming you're in the same network to make it go across subnets you just need to send the announcement packet yourself. It's a pretty easy hack, but it's kind of embarrassing for the manufacturer that their own software won't let you type in an IP address.
margor 3y ago
The cloud features are NOT integral to the experience. You absolutely can use the printer without touching the cloud but it makes the experience a lot nicer if you're not an advanced user who is used to buying their own camera, setting up their own VPN and configuring their own OctoPrint to get similar feature set. You actually have two different options aside from cloud - completely offline with SD-Card (which is what you get in ... almost all the other 3d printers?) and partially offline (I.e. via LAN) where you upload the g-code locally without passing it to the cloud. Look, I'm not trying to be a shill for BambuLab, but it just feels like people are making their opinion based on what they read at a glance without actually getting into details or even being able to confirm it themselves. Personally I believe they just enable less technical folks to actually make use of their printers and not be totally confused at variety different methods and learning about all the Linux stuff just to be able to get something basic as making it possible to see the print without standing next to it. I totally understand why The Cloud is perceived as an evil, but I think there is false dichotomy here where it's either everything or nothing. Looking at Bambu's team actions I truly believe they are at least _trying_ to provide to different kind of audiences (i.e. their LAN feature)
- dvdkon 3y ago
  I'm not against optional cloud features, but as far as I can see, the camera doesn't work in their LAN only mode. I'd say that's a big feature and makes the non-cloud operation of the printer an inferior mode, and that's something I'm definitely not on board with.
  - margor 3y ago
    But it does work in LAN mode since recent update[0] and as other commenters said - through RTSP stream as well. [0] https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/releases/tag/v01.07.00.53 https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/releases/tag/v01.07....
jrockway 3y ago
Yeah, the cloud nature of Bambu is kind of something looming over the community's head. They have RFID readers in the filament holder. The software's not open source. They already had an incident where jobs sent to the printer got held for several hours (so the printer turned on when they cleared the queue, which might have been unexpected). It just doesn't seem worth the lock-in risk to me. I will continue to buy printers from Prusa, even though they have zero interest in managing the supply chain. (Still have to import them from Europe, even though they bought a US-based retailer? Weird stuff. But I like them so I will give them a large benefit of the doubt.)
- margor 3y ago
  RFID reader is not a thing when you don't use AMS (for multi color printing). RFID is used to identify the filament, otherwise you just have to set it manually on what did you load to which holder.
  - regularfry 3y ago
    That's one shitty CEO change away from "your AMS will only work with our filament" and they've already sold you the hardware to do it.
    - iancmceachern 3y ago
      This problem has been solved on other printers. The dimension has been "jailbroken". Yoi can buy the rfid chips, reprogram them, people sell already done ones and even complete knock off filament cartridges. It's just like ink jet printers, you say this will be a problem but it just won't, the community will solve it for you.
  - function_seven 3y ago
    Are the RFID tags available to filament makers? Can I order some myself so I can put them on other spools?
    - 3y ago
amelius 3y ago
> whether to join the Apple Ecosystem™ or to stick with a beige box so I can run whatever OS I want Just a side note, but Apple is actually the "beige box" here, because you can only get it in one color and one design. You can build a DIY PC in lots of different form factors and colors.
iancmceachern 3y ago
It's founded by former DJI engineers, what did we expect? Top of class hardware tech, great design, almost too good to be true pricing, software is a bit weird and has some "weirdness".
snapplebobapple 3y ago
You perfectly captured how i feel about my firestick hd.its great, bht the enshitification scaffolding is too much. Charge me 20 dollars more and throw vanilla lineageos on there and you have my business all day, as it stands i want my money back.

bmurphy1976 3y ago

I don't love the closed nature of their platform but I love that they are forcing everyone else to step up their game. If Bambu is Apple, who's going to be Android and who's going the way of WebOS/Blackberry/Windows Phone? The next six to twelve months are going to be rough for some companies but we're going to have some incredibly powerful, cost effective, and user friendly machines when it's done.

userbinator 3y ago

It's no surprise that what's been making 2D printing an increasingly horrible experience has also started showing up in 3D too.

foxylad 3y ago

My 3d printing journey seems to have ended with a Prusa Mini. Really solid and well engineered device, and it's delightful that Prusa acknowledge the open-source hardware and software they depended on to build their company. BambooLab... well it is a nice machine, and they have definitely advanced the the field with input shaping. But this machine is pretty much a Prusa Mini with linear rails, and I'd bet there is open-source in their firmware and slicer, but there's no way to find out because their business model is to give nothing back to the ecosystem they have leveraged. That leaves a bad taste for me, but I'm sure many people will be quite happy to ignore such esoteric concerns and happily lock themselves in. Until BambooLab have a bad financial quarter. Then the optional cloud integration will become mandatory with a subscription, and the spool detection system will start reject non-BambooLab filament. Doctorow has struck a chord with his distillation of enshittification, and you are right on the money raising it here. (Meanwhile Prusa has just released input shaping for the Mini.)

function_seven 3y ago
The first time I saw the word “enshittification” it just clicked. It really is a tidy word! Do you have any opinion on the Creality K1? Not a technical one, but about their participation in the open community? Another comment in this thread brought it up, and it seems like a great machine.
- ganoushoreilly 3y ago
  Reality we’re being pretty shady and only acknowledged / released info after the community put up an uproar. The machine performance isn’t bad but I’d still recommend a p1p and just using local lan instead of the cloud. I own two x1cc, and 2 p1p, tons of ender 3 + 5’s, Prusa xl ( it’s a beast but slower than bambu by a decent margin).
dawnerd 3y ago
The slicer is open source, there’s a fork called orcaslicer based on it and kept up to date with Prusaslicer changes.
2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
Bambuu forks Prusa Slicer but appears to do the bare minimum to not get called out.
- jrockway 3y ago
  Prusa Slicer was forked from Slic3r. That's kind of the point of free software; fork it, change the colors, stick your name on it. (Prusa has done a lot more than that, of course.) Frankly, the less software that hardware companies write, the better. They already have their hands full with the firmware and probably don't need to be setting up CI infrastructure for Linux/Mac/Windows and all that stuff.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  They've been called out for removing credits from merged code by the main developer of OrcaSlicer: https://twitter.com/fever_soft/status/1678262984999837701 https://twitter.com/fever_soft/status/1678262984999837701 . Technically not against licenses, but still.

alsodumb 3y ago

Ahh, classic hackernews upvoting the 'I hate cloud' comment to the top. I have a few Bambu lab printers (perks of being a grad student) and their offline mode is pretty good - there are printers in my lab that are pretty much never connected to internet and print 24/7. Sure, offline mode doesn't have all the features they mention on their website, but even without it, Bambu lab printers are better than their competition by a HUGE margin. I've had all kinds of printers before, including Prusa. Nothing comes close to Bambu lab ones in terms of no non sense printing and cost. Sure, their components aren't open source, but official spares are cheap enough. And they promised to keep them cheap enough. Sure, they can change their word, and guess what? The printer would have made it's money's worth (for personal or commerical use) by the time that happens. You can throw away the printer by that point and you'd have net positive gain. Bambu lab is going to do what DJI did to drones. Period. Every kid is gonna have a 3D printer, every influencer is going to make a 3D printer is cool post, and lots of Christmas gifts are going to be Bambu 3D printers. Bambu lab is former DJI folks - no wonder their product strategy and in some way design language is so close to DJI.

function_seven 3y ago
I totally believe that these printers are technically amazing. That’s why I made the Apple vs. beige box analogy. Those M-series chips and their hardware quality are way better. But there is stronger lock-in. I’ve been burned so many times by other products that I think my wariness is more than justified. And I’m not alone, which is why this is “classic”. (But the pricing is really good. I think I’ll wait and see a bit more)
- blitz_skull 3y ago
  I think this is a valid analogy. Albeit, one that makes me all the more excited to buy a Bamboo. I’ve been a software engineer for a while now and personally I adore Apple’s approach to products. It just works. I don’t have to spend time fucking around with things I don’t want to. And most importantly, IT JUST WORKS. I hate what a pain it is to just get straight lines to print on my 3D printer! It shouldn’t be this hard. Granted, hopefully a swing towards Bamboo will put pressure on the other players in the market and they’ll up their game so that all the non-enthusiasts who just want to print can select from a variety of products.

technick 3y ago

I make things for conferences with 3d printers. I started with Wanhao printers, then went to Aurora Jaguar's... and then Prusa Mk3s's... and now am looking at a mixed print farm of Prusa MK3s and Bambu Labs X1C's. I'm selling the rest of my Prusa printers in the coming months and replacing them with more Bambu's, their product are amazing and 3-4x faster than prusa printers. I love Prusa but they were caught sleeping at the wheel, they stopped innovating until bambu labs woke them up.

jdietrich 3y ago

Bambu printers will accept G-code on a MicroSD card, like basically any 3D printer ever. The cloud stuff is optional, but very useful. I completely understand why people hate Bambu Lab, but I wish they'd understand why other people like them. If you want a new hobby, there are lots of excellent FDM printers on the market. If you just want to print good parts, you'd be a fool to buy anything other than a Bambu. There's just nothing else that will reliably produce dimensionally accurate parts out of the box and for thousands of hours afterwards, with absolutely no tinkering or troubleshooting.

function_seven 3y ago
A lot of responses to my comment keep mentioning the amazing technical details of this hardware. I believe it. I am not complaining about the hardware being subpar. That’s not my beef. If I have to schlep an SD card back-and-forth from my laptop to my printer, that’s a crap experience. And for them to block local network uploading—and force you to make an account for that feature—sorry, that is a classic dark pattern. It has a cool video camera built in. But oops!, it can only send a video to our servers, not to you. When companies employ dark patterns like these, it is a signal that I no longer ignore. EDIT: I forgot: > but I wish they'd understand why other people like them. Yeah I get it. Given how many people I’ve seen using these printers rave about them, I do understand how leaps in speed and quality make it worth it. I’m not in as great a need for that personally. But I get it.
- margor 3y ago
  Sorry but that is just FUD. I own BambuLab and make use of their LAN feature all the time. The camera stream works without account and cloud access (albeit, they recently added that!), so does uploading g-code through the LAN without any account. You _just_ install BambuStudio, connect to the printer with a code shown on it and assuming you're in the same network - it just works. No account or any cloud needed for that.
  - nullc 3y ago
    Yes but it's a fairly recent change. > and assuming you're in the same network to make it go across subnets you just need to send the announcement packet yourself. It's a pretty easy hack, but it's kind of embarrassing for the manufacturer that their own software won't let you type in an IP address.

margor 3y ago

The cloud features are NOT integral to the experience. You absolutely can use the printer without touching the cloud but it makes the experience a lot nicer if you're not an advanced user who is used to buying their own camera, setting up their own VPN and configuring their own OctoPrint to get similar feature set. You actually have two different options aside from cloud - completely offline with SD-Card (which is what you get in ... almost all the other 3d printers?) and partially offline (I.e. via LAN) where you upload the g-code locally without passing it to the cloud. Look, I'm not trying to be a shill for BambuLab, but it just feels like people are making their opinion based on what they read at a glance without actually getting into details or even being able to confirm it themselves. Personally I believe they just enable less technical folks to actually make use of their printers and not be totally confused at variety different methods and learning about all the Linux stuff just to be able to get something basic as making it possible to see the print without standing next to it. I totally understand why The Cloud is perceived as an evil, but I think there is false dichotomy here where it's either everything or nothing. Looking at Bambu's team actions I truly believe they are at least _trying_ to provide to different kind of audiences (i.e. their LAN feature)

dvdkon 3y ago
I'm not against optional cloud features, but as far as I can see, the camera doesn't work in their LAN only mode. I'd say that's a big feature and makes the non-cloud operation of the printer an inferior mode, and that's something I'm definitely not on board with.
- margor 3y ago
  But it does work in LAN mode since recent update[0] and as other commenters said - through RTSP stream as well. [0] https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/releases/tag/v01.07.00.53 https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/releases/tag/v01.07....

jrockway 3y ago

Yeah, the cloud nature of Bambu is kind of something looming over the community's head. They have RFID readers in the filament holder. The software's not open source. They already had an incident where jobs sent to the printer got held for several hours (so the printer turned on when they cleared the queue, which might have been unexpected). It just doesn't seem worth the lock-in risk to me. I will continue to buy printers from Prusa, even though they have zero interest in managing the supply chain. (Still have to import them from Europe, even though they bought a US-based retailer? Weird stuff. But I like them so I will give them a large benefit of the doubt.)

margor 3y ago
RFID reader is not a thing when you don't use AMS (for multi color printing). RFID is used to identify the filament, otherwise you just have to set it manually on what did you load to which holder.
- regularfry 3y ago
  That's one shitty CEO change away from "your AMS will only work with our filament" and they've already sold you the hardware to do it.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    This problem has been solved on other printers. The dimension has been "jailbroken". Yoi can buy the rfid chips, reprogram them, people sell already done ones and even complete knock off filament cartridges. It's just like ink jet printers, you say this will be a problem but it just won't, the community will solve it for you.
- function_seven 3y ago
  Are the RFID tags available to filament makers? Can I order some myself so I can put them on other spools?
  - 3y ago

amelius 3y ago

> whether to join the Apple Ecosystem™ or to stick with a beige box so I can run whatever OS I want Just a side note, but Apple is actually the "beige box" here, because you can only get it in one color and one design. You can build a DIY PC in lots of different form factors and colors.

iancmceachern 3y ago

It's founded by former DJI engineers, what did we expect? Top of class hardware tech, great design, almost too good to be true pricing, software is a bit weird and has some "weirdness".

snapplebobapple 3y ago

You perfectly captured how i feel about my firestick hd.its great, bht the enshitification scaffolding is too much. Charge me 20 dollars more and throw vanilla lineageos on there and you have my business all day, as it stands i want my money back.