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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-sourc

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.
  - obscurette 3y ago
    Been there, done that. That's why I stopped actively contributing open source many years ago. Not because I discovered my code without any mentioning in appliances from heavily subsidized Chinese company, but because nobody gave any s*t, even my own employer. "Stop whining, it's too_good_to_be_true cheap stuff!"
nebula8804 3y ago
You are letting your past experience color your objective opinions here. As someone who refused to even want to get into 3D printing.... last month in preparation for DEFCON, I was forced into entering this world in order to make a special project for the con. Knowing absolutely nothing, I first picked the Sovol SV06 because is was a strong recommendation from Reddit for the price I was willing to pay.....turns out its nothing more than a toy. In fact all these bed slingers are. All this modding and manual work is not something a normal person wants to do. It like we are still stuck in the 1970s computer kit building era and everyone in the community is in denial. Out of pure desperation and considering my hard deadline of DEFCON, I bit the bullet and bought a used Bambu Labs X1c. This machine is in a class of its own for 3D printing newbies. I just load the filament, slice my model in their easy to use software and click print. That printer saved me big time. I consider it the absolute bare minimum for 3D Printing for people that dont really care about 3D Printing. I hope that the X1c or something like it eventually reaches a price point where it is accessible to the mass market and becomes the bare minimum standard of quality and ease of use. Anything less will keep 3D printing as a niche hobby. Kinda like how we went through decades of really awful inkjet and laser printers to now get printers that are cheap, accessible to anybody by being plug and play and straightforward and fairly ok in reliability: basically an extremely mature market. One more note about open source: There is no "open source" desktop laser/inkjet printer and people get on with their lives regardless. The 3D printing community embracing open source is an artifact of it still being stuck in the "computer kit building" era.
- onli 3y ago
  Laser and inkjet printers are not exactly a healthy market, and one customers are not accepting anymore because of all the user hostility. That's not a convincing argument pro the proprietary future of 3D printers.
  - nebula8804 3y ago
    I didn't say it was a healthy market (which is subjective anyway). I said it was a mature market. ie. The tech is established and all the brands are pretty much interchangeable for the most part.
ThatPlayer 3y ago
I've got a Bambu printer and it's fine. I've completely blocked it from internet access (for good reason). It'd be pretty hard for them to update my printer for mandatory cloud integration. I don't think this printer even does spool detection unless I get their AMS unit. Their slicer is a fork of PrusaSlicer, and even has a pretty well supported community fork OrcaSlicer which is what I use. The problem is to interface with the printer over wifi, you need to use their closed source module. Now could they somehow push a firmware update over that? Definitely. Anyways I've got a Prusa XL preordered. Just waiting on them to let me change my preorder to the 5 toolhead version. Multi-tool looks way more exciting than Bambu's filament changer that creates a ton of waste.
turnsout 3y ago
People seem to love their Prusa machines… I've seen that brand mentioned by people who run 10+ machines for small-scale production runs. Can you add any color about why you chose Prusa, and how you view them within the broader market? Are they the Honda CRV of the 3D printer world?
- 404mm 3y ago
  For me, it’s the modularity. No matter what breaks, you can get a replacement part fairly quick and cheap. It’s relatively easy to take apart and build it back yourself. You can even re-print your plastic components yourself. I personally don’t have the “mileage” on my printer to have my own opinion, but others say it’s quite reliable and doesn’t break down often.
- fps-hero 3y ago
  If you want to use a car analogy, Prusa is the Toyota of the 3D printing world. No-one is arguably what they offer isn’t high quality, it’s just it’s 5 years too late, and costs too much. For a company that’s been leading the charge on hobbyist 3D printing, they completely missed the boat on the Voron style printers. If they had simply mass produced a voron style 250x250x250mm printer, right around the time they announced the XL, and actually delivered it, the world would be a different place, and you could talk about Bambu Labs and Prusa in the same sentence. Prusa is getting destroyed at every price point in every measure of quality. You can get the same quality for cheaper, or better quality for the same price. Prusa’s ideological purity in reprap style printers has held them back. No significant innovations in hardware, no economies of scale from mass production, using open source firmware but failing to take advantage of community innovations like input shaping. The only place they really had an edge in was the slicer, which turned out to be the most portable part of their ecosystem. Bambu labs illustrates how glacially slow the 3D printing industry have been innovating. A Prusa MK4 isn’t that far detached from the I3 that came 10 years before it. If the list of improvements amounts to a couple of dot points, that’s a sorry state of affairs.
404mm 3y ago
BambooLab forked and “rebranded” PrusaSlicer (in a not so cool way) https://twitter.com/josefprusa/status/1542259514828791811?lang=en https://twitter.com/josefprusa/status/1542259514828791811?la... Their new printer features seem to match pretty closely with Prusa updates. Looks like the innovation is heavily based on reverse engineering here.

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.
- obscurette 3y ago
  Been there, done that. That's why I stopped actively contributing open source many years ago. Not because I discovered my code without any mentioning in appliances from heavily subsidized Chinese company, but because nobody gave any s*t, even my own employer. "Stop whining, it's too_good_to_be_true cheap stuff!"

nebula8804 3y ago

You are letting your past experience color your objective opinions here. As someone who refused to even want to get into 3D printing.... last month in preparation for DEFCON, I was forced into entering this world in order to make a special project for the con. Knowing absolutely nothing, I first picked the Sovol SV06 because is was a strong recommendation from Reddit for the price I was willing to pay.....turns out its nothing more than a toy. In fact all these bed slingers are. All this modding and manual work is not something a normal person wants to do. It like we are still stuck in the 1970s computer kit building era and everyone in the community is in denial. Out of pure desperation and considering my hard deadline of DEFCON, I bit the bullet and bought a used Bambu Labs X1c. This machine is in a class of its own for 3D printing newbies. I just load the filament, slice my model in their easy to use software and click print. That printer saved me big time. I consider it the absolute bare minimum for 3D Printing for people that dont really care about 3D Printing. I hope that the X1c or something like it eventually reaches a price point where it is accessible to the mass market and becomes the bare minimum standard of quality and ease of use. Anything less will keep 3D printing as a niche hobby. Kinda like how we went through decades of really awful inkjet and laser printers to now get printers that are cheap, accessible to anybody by being plug and play and straightforward and fairly ok in reliability: basically an extremely mature market. One more note about open source: There is no "open source" desktop laser/inkjet printer and people get on with their lives regardless. The 3D printing community embracing open source is an artifact of it still being stuck in the "computer kit building" era.

onli 3y ago
Laser and inkjet printers are not exactly a healthy market, and one customers are not accepting anymore because of all the user hostility. That's not a convincing argument pro the proprietary future of 3D printers.
- nebula8804 3y ago
  I didn't say it was a healthy market (which is subjective anyway). I said it was a mature market. ie. The tech is established and all the brands are pretty much interchangeable for the most part.

ThatPlayer 3y ago

I've got a Bambu printer and it's fine. I've completely blocked it from internet access (for good reason). It'd be pretty hard for them to update my printer for mandatory cloud integration. I don't think this printer even does spool detection unless I get their AMS unit. Their slicer is a fork of PrusaSlicer, and even has a pretty well supported community fork OrcaSlicer which is what I use. The problem is to interface with the printer over wifi, you need to use their closed source module. Now could they somehow push a firmware update over that? Definitely. Anyways I've got a Prusa XL preordered. Just waiting on them to let me change my preorder to the 5 toolhead version. Multi-tool looks way more exciting than Bambu's filament changer that creates a ton of waste.

turnsout 3y ago

People seem to love their Prusa machines… I've seen that brand mentioned by people who run 10+ machines for small-scale production runs. Can you add any color about why you chose Prusa, and how you view them within the broader market? Are they the Honda CRV of the 3D printer world?

404mm 3y ago
For me, it’s the modularity. No matter what breaks, you can get a replacement part fairly quick and cheap. It’s relatively easy to take apart and build it back yourself. You can even re-print your plastic components yourself. I personally don’t have the “mileage” on my printer to have my own opinion, but others say it’s quite reliable and doesn’t break down often.
fps-hero 3y ago
If you want to use a car analogy, Prusa is the Toyota of the 3D printing world. No-one is arguably what they offer isn’t high quality, it’s just it’s 5 years too late, and costs too much. For a company that’s been leading the charge on hobbyist 3D printing, they completely missed the boat on the Voron style printers. If they had simply mass produced a voron style 250x250x250mm printer, right around the time they announced the XL, and actually delivered it, the world would be a different place, and you could talk about Bambu Labs and Prusa in the same sentence. Prusa is getting destroyed at every price point in every measure of quality. You can get the same quality for cheaper, or better quality for the same price. Prusa’s ideological purity in reprap style printers has held them back. No significant innovations in hardware, no economies of scale from mass production, using open source firmware but failing to take advantage of community innovations like input shaping. The only place they really had an edge in was the slicer, which turned out to be the most portable part of their ecosystem. Bambu labs illustrates how glacially slow the 3D printing industry have been innovating. A Prusa MK4 isn’t that far detached from the I3 that came 10 years before it. If the list of improvements amounts to a couple of dot points, that’s a sorry state of affairs.

404mm 3y ago

BambooLab forked and “rebranded” PrusaSlicer (in a not so cool way) https://twitter.com/josefprusa/status/1542259514828791811?lang=en https://twitter.com/josefprusa/status/1542259514828791811?la... Their new printer features seem to match pretty closely with Prusa updates. Looks like the innovation is heavily based on reverse engineering here.