Full disclosure: I've never owned a Bambu because I've never loved the idea of a "closed" ecosystem 3D printer, however I have used them, and am very familiar with the 3d printing space beyond Bambu.
For anyone considering alternatives: You should know that almost all other 3D printers expect you to know a little more about how they actually work than Bambus. Bambus are as close as you can get to a "just works" type experience, but modern alternatives from others are nowhere near as hard as they used to be.
The closest "easy" alternative is probably Prusa, but you'll pay significantly more for a Prusa machine than you would a Bambu. They're an excellent company, and the complete opposite of Bambu when it comes to Openness. If money is no object, Prusa is highly recommended.
I personally run an old Elegoo Neptune 4 pro - but my needs are quite low. If I were buying today, a Snapmaker U1 or the Creality K2 Plus is probably where I'd end up going.
Prusa are pretty much plug and play these days, especially the Core One line-up.
You're right that they're expensive but you get free human support 24x7, you get an open platform, lots of contributions to open source (even Bambu Studio is a fork of Prusa Slicer), and they pretty much go on forever.
My Core One+ started its life as an original MK3 and went through each iteration of upgrades, and it works like new. I'm now waiting for an INDX upgrade for it.
IMO the main drawback of consumer Prusa offerings is the lack of good chamber heating for more advanced materials. I can print PC on my Core One+ in the summer with the chamber at 45℃ (good enough for most uses, but 60 would be better), but in the winter it becomes a lot harder.
The Core One L is supposedly better in that regard but I've seen reports that it's still not ideal.
Other than that, I feel the extra cash pays itself back in the long run.
Is there any guidance on improving the Core One chamber? I would like to add some thermal insulation around the chamber, but I'm not sure if the firmware will properly detect unexpected thermal insulation in problematic scenario's, if it blindly assumes its a stock Core One... the more you modify a printer, the more it operates in terra incognita.
Could too much thermal insulation cause the bed temperature to lower (to avoid overheating chamber temp) to the point the print no longer adheres? etc.
If you could recommend some articles on the subject I would highly appreciate it.
Mine is more or less stock. I've been searching for an existing mod but haven't really found one. A good start is probably to plug all the little leakage points around the corners and unused rivet/bolt holes.
The main issue is how close the walls are to the bed, which makes a lot of insulation projects dead in the water. If a radiator reflector foil [0] can be made to fit, it might help quite a bit as well.
Other than that, proper active chamber heating is really where we should be heading. When I have the time I might attempt to replace the left panel with one.
You can insulate the chamber. That works fine. There is a vent on top which is open in case the printer needs lower temps. For everything else it will turn on the chamber fan. The parameters are tunable in the menu (or via G-Code).
We could search in the source, but I’m 99.999% sure it is a PID, because of course has to work in different environments. So I do not think it should be a problem.
Prusa is still the most 'open source-ish' choice, but they're no longer a polar opposite to Bambu, in 2023 they started making efforts to stop commercialization of their designs, stopped sharing source/design material for their PCBs, etc.
Then in 2025 they changed their 'open community license' to say users may not:
“Sell complete machines or remixes based on these files, unless you have a separate agreement…” and “The Restriction: You cannot commercially exploit the design files…”
Maybe this is more a comment on how open source has had to change in the face of commercial exploitation of the vulnerabilities traditional open source licenses create for the businesses doing the R&D.
I've been a Prusa defender for a long time, including when they added the break-off tab to enable custom firmware which caused a lot of upset.
They're doing what it takes to be a business. I was glad when they moved to more injection molded parts instead of trying to 3D print their own parts. It was a cool idea at the start but the time for that was long past.
My only slight objection is that you can tell they're trying to have it both ways: They want all of the good will and reputation of being open source, but they're also trying hard to put as many limits on this as they can. Like all projects trying to walk the line between open and closed source, I think they're at their best when they're honest about what they're doing. The moves they made with their open license are completely reasonable and I support them, but that blog post was a bit of a letdown when they tried to make it about fighting patent trolls for the community or something. When you reach Prusa scale you have to be honest that you're no longer one and the same with the community. You are the medium-ish size business that people rely on. Taking away the right for others to sell the products is a reasonable business move, but please be honest about it rather than trying to tell us it's for our own good.
They were so deeply undercut by Chinese clone vendors that buying Prusa made little sense to consumers. They couldn't survive without banning them. The situation was similar to IBM PC, but Prusa Research was no IBM.
You can be entirely in favor of the open source ethos, even as a commercial entity, but then certain actors can take advantage of that ethos and just directly commercialize your R&D investment and take all the proceeds of your investment, whether or not they comply with attribution or share-alike requirements.
It’s tough seeing an open source project you’ve poured tons of care and effort into (and WANT people to share and remix and build cool things) get more or less “extracted” for profit without contributing back (code or money).
At the end of the day, none of it really matters unless you’ve got money and time to actually try to enforce your licenses, or have enough customer mindshare to effectively change the behavior of bad actors without needing legal action.
I’ll probably use licenses like Prusas in the future for similar reasons, even though I generally prefer to use less restrictive ones. Bad actors, or even just non-benevolent actors, can really sour the open source ethos, and it sucks but there’s no way to legally enforce “don’t be a jerk” without restricting a legal document in slightly unpalatable ways.
Nothing in Prusa's OCL stops anyone from cloning and selling their printer.
It only stops the honest people from doing that (and possibly much more, like manufacturing and selling replacement parts or mods).
Creating 3D models from existing products is relatively fast and easy. The hard parts have always been the actual design process, materials selection, and setting up the supply and manufacturing chain.
Prusa took what was practically a non-issue (cloning of their modern printers which have multiple custom parts and are overall not easy to clone cheaply anyway) and used it to restrict the freedoms of end users and small businesses while crying about how they are the victims.
I lost a lot of respect for Prusa when they came out with the OCL.
A damn patent would have been both more effective and less restrictive for reasonable commercial purposes.
What you’ve said is true but also misses the point. Licenses have never been about stopping bad actions because a bit of text can’t prevent someone from buying materials and building things, just like a speed limit sign has never stopped someone from speeding (unless they crash into it).
They ARE however deterrents to bad actions from less-than-scrupulous entities, and enforcement mechanisms against fully-unscrupulous entities.
I suspect (but will admit I am just guessing here) that Prusa would prefer not to get to the enforcement stage because it is both costly and annoying, but having that in your back pocket is, sadly, necessary in a litigious society with some number of unscrupulous actors, and the deterrent effect alone is likely enough to achieve most of their goals.
It’s not problematic to restrict people from selling the thing you designed, made and sell without permission.
If I make an open source car, I don’t want someone else taking my design work, and then selling a cheaper version of my product, I want my consumers to build their own parts.
Sure, but you're comparing morality to the legal definitions in software licenses.
Different licenses are build around different philosophies, and the common open source definitions allow commercialization as long as the source & modifications you make are freely available to others. Prusa is breaking from that tradition.
Maybe you should make a source-available car, or a car with select portions of CAD available, or something else that fits your intended business model better than open-source.
I don’t know if bambu is easier than Prusa. Bought myself a Prusa core one, having absolutely no idea whatsoever what is 3D printing, plugged in, the included filament in, just as the 10 pages manual says, click click, and I made my first print (no internet connection, no wifi, no registration, no app).
Then I installed the app (open source in github) and started using the “cloud” services. I consider myself pretty stupid with such things, and it was absolutely the easiest thing I’ve done in 10 years.
The price is very high though. But at least you OWN the damn thing.
I have an Elegoo Centauri Carbon which is cheaper than Bambu Lab's and it has been plug and play so far. I have no experience with 3D Printing and I've been printing on it without any problems so far.
I have a P1S. Putting it together and running it was about IKEA level of difficulty. Very easy. If money weren’t a problem, which Prusa printer comes closest (assuming we’d want something like the Bambu AMS2)?
There are a bunch of these I’m my local makerspace and they generally work great, and are often easily used by members on the more ‘craft’ side of things who’d never hang out here. Was surprised not to see them mentioned more in the discussions around this.
I have no first-hand idea of they’re ’morally’ better than Bambu - I haven’t looked into it - but I think the folks in charge of buying them considered that.
I think the Bambu social contract is pretty clear:
- they benefit from open source software work
- we benefit from their dirt cheap top performing machines
As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me. They provide insane social value through accessibility. Before them, it was Creality with the Ender 3.
My problem with Pruša as an European is that it turns us into the equivalent of being a Chinese citizen who can't afford the Temu product they make at work. Their machines are priced more or less only for US export, and not really something most people here can reasonably buy. They even refuse to use injection moulding out of some self righteous principle, which drives the price per unit up further all the while selling less durable machines cause they're half RepRap. I take it sort of as a personal insult and I will never buy one even though I can afford it, I see it as bad value. Like buying a gold plated watch or something.
I'm an open-source advocate (some would say zealot?) but I ended up buying a Bambu P1S a few months back because my research indicated that there were ways use it normally without creating a Bambu account, or using their slicer, or having to send all of your prints through their servers.
I don't have my notes in front of me, but I managed to do all of that with hardly any trouble at all. IIRC, you only had to change one setting on the printer itself, and optionally block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry. I have only used OrcaSlicer to tweak my models, mess with parameters, and send the prints to the printers.
So other than Bambu getting all heavy-handed with a legitimate open-source fork of their slicer software (which is definitely not okay), I'm not sure I'm clear on what the kerfuffle is about. Are their printers now MORE locked down than before? Or maybe only certain models?
"you only had to change one setting on the printer itself, and optionally block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry" - "only" is doing a lot of work here. Yes, this is easy for us, but that part alone is beyond most users.
I have a P1S myself, and I find Bambu to be a strange company. They're one that has benefited tremendously from OSS while sometimes violating both the ethos and licenses.
They specifically engineer it such that your prints need to go through an intermediary even when it could send it right to your device on a simple network. That'd be like a laserjet routing through the cloud instead of going to your device. With nothing much in the way of encrypting your designs and protecting your data, it feels like this was done on purpose. Given the shameless track record of many (most?) Chinese companies on IP, my assumption is that they're mainly doing this to steal designs. The juxtaposition of their poor track record on OSS, what seems like a shady approach to privacy and IP protection, and the aggressive legal posturing - all sum up to what I think is a very untrustworthy organization.
Luckily my designs are in the "look at this trash" territory, so I don't have anything to worry about, but I certainly wouldn't use this for important work.
Funny how fast people forget. LAN mode was NOT part of their original plan until outrage like this happened last time. They shifted their course and changed their blog post after. Putting pressure as a customer is how you steer company’s direction.
That’s good in theory but there are also plenty of counter examples of companies forcing features and still making it by just sheer brand reputation or market share (HP still has DRM’d ink, Keurig is still going after “hacks”) or just money (OpenAI promised to open source their model).
I’m not saying we shouldn’t shame those companies for not abiding to their words, but there is more to it than outrage. Suing them (or the threat of) might also work here if they really went against the license.
Also, LAN mode is NOT a substitute for the functionality you bought the printer with.
My biggest annoyance is that I can no longer use OrcaSlicer to interact with my printers (e.g. sync filaments) and start prints remotely. I am still very annoyed at Bambu Labs for this stupid move, as it directly impacts my usage.
What most people seem to be missing in these discussions is that some of us have printers in remote workshops, not next to us. So all the "LAN" or "Developer" options aren't great, especially if you have to pick between those OR the cloud.
I am an outsider on the details of the Bambu software requiring to go through their servers and closed software.
Still I suspect it is about spying, Bambu printers are at the core of the Ukrainian war effort, the reason Ukraine is winning since januari.
First China prevented Ukraine from using any of the drones that they sold in millions to Russia while exercising the built in kill switches in Chinese drones used in by Ukrainians.
Suddenly Bambu, another Chinese company started listening in on the 3D printing on a massive scale in secret factories all over Ukraine that make the drones to replace the Chinese drones. Very suspicious.
Whatever is the reason Bambu locks down software or firmware on their 3D printers, now is the time for programmers to change the situation. We need to put up money like Louis Rossmann did [1], not to fight legal battles but for a assembly language programmer to reverse engineer the Bambu firmware and make a free and open source version.
This firmware replacement will cost a couple of months to write so we all should send that programmer a little money so he/she can release it for free.
A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.
Now is the chance for us outsiders to help Ukraine, by freeing Bambu firmware.
P.S. I would be willing to do the reverse engineering but I would need at least 35 euro per day (to eat) to build a new firmware for all Bambu models from scratch. I would need a few different models of printers on loan for a few weeks to test the new firmware. I estimate it would take 5-9 months to rebuild firmware for all models from zero and release it. Maybe Rossmann and Geerling could use their influence and coördinate this freeing of the firmware?
I just emailed Rosmann and Geering to see if we together can free the Bambu firmware. Anyone who wants to help, please contact me trough my HN profile.
There is still no hard requirement that you go through their servers. The printers support a mode where they can only be accessed from the local network.
the Ukraine war started in 2014 technically. But even if we go to the "current" wave start, that was 24 February 2022[0].
Bambu Labs released their first printer (X1C, on kickstarter) on 31 May 2022, let alone their "must go through cloud service" restriction starting in early 2025[1].
Lot of conspiracy theory and misinformation in this comment.
I'm not up to date with their latest printers, but the Bambu printers used during this timeframe have easy ways to enable LAN only mode. You can leave it disconnected from the network entirely and use an SD card, too.
The app lets you enable root access and install firmware mods. There are multiple efforts to reverse engineer the firmware.
I couldn't find a source for China disabling drones it sold to Ukraine, but they did cut off drone exports to Ukraine, while still supplying them to Russia:
> This firmware replacement will cost a couple of months to write so we all should send that programmer a little money so he/she can release it for free.
> A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.
If that were true, it seems to me, that Ukraine would have already done it if it was somehow standing in their way.
Yes you can use the code however you want but equally they are free to bar anyone they wish from accessing their servers. These are completely orthogonal issues in a legal sense.
They're essentially saying "yes, the code is open source, but you're not allowed to modify it or we'll ban you and threaten you with legal action", which is completely antithetical to the whole idea behind open source (especially the GPL which literally says in the license text itself that it was created to protect your right to run modified software). "Violation of the open source social contract" is a good way to describe it.
You're correct of course that this is an entirely distinct argument from what Bambu's legally allowed to do under existing law.
You can run modified software per the GPL but that does not include the right to connect to Bambu's servers with your modified software. That is entirely reasonable (especially since this is not some social/messaging application). If I release a client as open source, that doesn't mean it's OK for modified clients to connect to my server. I expect you to use it offline or set up your own server to connect to.
I don't know if that is what is happening here because the article is talking about a fork that is bypassing Bambu's servers entirely (which is permitted under the AGPL).
They can bar people from accessing their servers if they do so by rewriting the entire slicer to be closed source and then implementing some actual security, instead of literally giving you the means of access AND the permission to use and modify it as you wish.
Techies like us get caught up in mechanism all the time in discussions like this.
But, though there are some explicit laws where that’s how it works, that’s not generally how the legal system works. If I have a private server, and I don’t give you permission to access it - or, even better, tell you not to, it doesn’t really matter how I secure it. If you access it, you’re in the wrong.
To give a physical analogy, it doesn’t matter how I’ve secured my house. Even if the door is open, you’re not allowed to just waltz in (or, to take it a bit further, come in and start using my stuff).
Spoofing a User-Agent by itself is not illegal. Browsers, curl, bots, monitoring tools, and privacy tools do this constantly for legitimate reasons.
The legal risk comes from why you are doing it and what protections you are bypassing.
If you are doing it specifically to bypass Bambu's authorized access, then it is very likely to fall afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The mechanism (spoofing the UA) is entirely incidental to the motivation (bypass authorized access), which is what the law cares about.
I don't think courts basically ever settle narrow technical questions like that. Any court decision would carry with it particular baggage based on the rest of the specifics, so I don't think it would have established a clear precedent either way.
The funny part here is it seems Bambu is more exposed to a libel suit than the developer is for... checks notes clicking 'Fork' on Bambu's github. Since the moment he did that, his software was supposedly in breach of Bambu's...expectations.
Thanks, would have been surprised, was mainly asking because OP was mentioning legal concerns. This may be a case for their EULA, sure, but I would have been surprised if there was any legal precedent or grounding for such a statement.
weev got convicted for something pretty similar to this. His conviction was vacated, but he did spend time in prison for unauthorized access to an AT&T server that only required a specific user agent and a guessable numeric device ID number.
At least in the US, the law against unauthorized access to a computer system has no requirements for how good the security has to be. If you should reasonably know you're not supposed to be using it, that's potentially enough to make it illegal.
"You can't use any client you want because of security" is bullshit, as if hackers will care what client you'd like them to use or not when they're trying to hack your infrastructure.
This is just Bambu alienating their customer base, again.
> We have documented incidents of service outages caused precisely by spikes in unauthorized traffic - overwhelming the servers, causing service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users.
So it's a problem that their printers are popular, and they can't be bothered to scale their infra, so let's gate everything based on USER AGENT STRING! This is so crazy of an excuse that I don't believe it.
I bought my bambu labs ps1 about 4 years ago now. I have never connected it to the internet. I've never printed from bambu slicer. I've always exported the gcode and manually placed it into the machine. It's been a nuisance and I'd never recommend Bambu to anyone else because of this. I knew they were collecting from the beginning and I CHOOSE to do it this way, which is incredibly sad. Our data has a lot of value and I refuse to be monitored. I just wish more people would choose to push back.
I don't disagree with Bambu from an operational standpoint, but disagree with their handling of this.
They are offering a cloud infrastructure that allows users to remote control the printer via their software. If they don't want users to use a non-approved software to access their cloud, they should just build auth around it and explicitly tell people that. The accessibility for users to utilize the printer without going through official software and cloud is a whole other can of worms of course.
This whole fiasco could have been avoided by not being so confrontational, giving their user base ideological ammo.
What's most surprising to me is that this is coming from a company that directly markets towards hackers and makers.
Like when you think of the App/Play store lockdowns, the new ReCaptcha attestation stuff, and other things that have a more authoritarian angle to it as of late, you can at least see how it happens: most of their consumers aren't technical and don't even know how to argue against it or why they should care.
With Bambu on the other hand, I'd think a good portion of its customers do actively care about this kind of thing. 3D printing just doesn't have the same market reach as computers and smartphones.
Also, it seems to me like there's eventually going to be a turning of the tide on all of these pushes (app stores included) and companies that are making these kinds of moves aren't seeing that writing on the wall.
A User Agent not being suitable for any kind of authorisation aside, given this was published under AGPL, is any kind of legal action even possible? Or is this like DMCA abuse, technically not grounded in any legal basis (and in the case of knowingly filing an improper DMCA claim, clearly illegal but never prosecuted) and solely a scare/might makes right tactic?
The license isn't the issue. It's the User Agreement. Bambu is claiming that the fork is allowing, enabling, (and/or promoting, encouraging, etc) users to violate the agreement with Bambu to not use their cloud with third party software.
I'm fairly certain user agreements have been used for suing makers of game cheats and other similar things. Certainly in the industry I work in, there was a company making third party software and integrating it with the industry standard tool without going through the official channels, which caused people to violate the user agreement when used. They got sued and settled.
I own a H2C and have been a huge fan of bambu for a few years, full disclosure.
I don't really see why everyone is up in arms about this. You are able to print in LAN mode or directly through USB drives without going through bambus servers.
Their slicer is open source but it downloads a plugin once you launch it if you choose to which is closed sourced that interacts with their APIs.
Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.
To me, the problem with all of this is that it seems strange to want the plugin when bambu will just shut off their resources to unsigned versions of the network plugin if the orca slicer dev got their way.
I'm open to being convinced but I just don't think the cross-section of people who want this would actually want prints going through bambus cloud so this effort really feels vain.
It also feels like bad framing as well because every post I see about this thing really tries to blur the line and claim this plugin and orca slicer are one and the same.
> Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.
The GPLv3 specifically was written to address a problem called "TiVo-ization", which is when a hardware vendor uses some trick (DRM, proprietary blobs, whatever) to prevent users from actually running modified versions of the software.
The AGPL, the license of this particular software, extends the GPLv3 with protections for users of network services:
> Simply put, the AGPLv3 is effectively the GPLv3, but with an additional licensing term that ensures that users who interact over a network with modified versions of the program can receive the source code for that program. In both licenses, sections four through six provide the terms that give users the right to receive the source code of a program.
The Linux and proprietary drivers situation is more complicated, but proprietary drivers on Linux are generally restricted to interfaces that Linux chooses to expose to them for that purpose. But the Linux kernel seems to take a narrower view of what constitutes a derivative work than was likely intended by the FSF in writing the GPL. Under a "traditional" reading of the GPL, those proprietary drivers are meant to be illegal. Whether some or all of the linking done by proprietary drivers in the Linux kernel is really allowed by the GPL or not is somewhat untested, I think.
You have LAN mode only because everyone was up in arms the first time. LAN mode was not part of the plan at first and Bambulab was forced to offer after “listening to their customer”.
Sure, but the op is saying “i don’t get why everyone is up in arms”. Without the up in arms you don’t get the correction. Which is why people are up in arms - to get them to further correct.
Correction is one of many signals, and it’s better than ignoring pushback, but it’s still usually worse than not needing the correction in the first place.
Sure, a manufacturer that didn’t need to course correct yet doesn’t mean they won’t change their stance in the future, but the same is true for one that already course-corrected.
We see this with privacy eroding laws continually - legislators will “listen” and course correct if there’s pushback, only to reintroduce the bill in the next legislative session, repeatedly, until it gets passed.
I’d prefer the one that hasn’t yet signaled a desire to do something negative in the past to one that has, even if they walked it back later.
Someone who isn’t racist because they grew up in a progressive family just means they were lucky. They often have never been tested under pressure.
On the other hand, someone who grew up in a racist family and ends up not racist means their beliefs are battle tested. This is a real test of character — it also tells me how they process information.
What you’re describing is a third case where someone pretends to correct but has no intention to, which I do not think Bambu’s original act of opening of LAN access qualifies.
Now I think the other dimension here is that people are expecting Bambu to believe in open source. They might not actually, which is their own opinion to have, but that’s a different problem altogether. I believe in local access but not necessarily open sourcing of everything so from my PoV, Bambu’s stance is perfectly consistent.
> It also feels like bad framing as well because every post I see about this thing really tries to blur the line and claim this plugin and orca slicer are one and the same.
Doesn't it sounds weird to you? I mean, what the reason they have to blur the line? Are they just clueless? Or maybe they fight for some political reason, like an anti-corporate stance, and Bambu is just a convenient target for them?
I'm asking, what you think of them, because I can't understand you. Your take on the conflict is incompatible with behavior of the people opposing Bambu. Or rather it leaves no good explanations for their behavior. When I notice it, I start digging, because if the situation doesn't have a good explanation, it means I do not understand the situation. But you just accept your understanding, so you have some good explanation for people's behavior?
> I don't really see why everyone is up in arms about this. You are able to print in LAN mode or directly through USB drives without going through bambus servers.
This is in no way equivalent. You can't sync filaments, you can't monitor printers in your slicer, you can't monitor prints from your phone. This is like going backwards at least 5 years.
I find this shallow take really annoying, as it tends to derail most discussions ("you have LAN mode, so what are you complaining about").
Regardless of the license if they only want their own software interacting with their cloud API, I don't really care because USB and LAN are there. That is ample ability to interact with the machine.
Plenty of situations would make me feel differently, but I'm fine with their restrictions in this case.
Bambu has proven time and again that they don't understand security. Unless, of course, it's theater and by design because real security would be inconvenient to state actors. Regardless, they gaslight and bludgeon those who wish to use the hardware they purchased in peace offline and away from prying eyes.
Having said all that, the hardware is very good. Software, not so much.
Good article, but I'd like to ask about two small technical details (I've used Bambu before, but I'm not very familiar with the 3D printing ecosystem).
1. OrcaSlicer: so it's a fork of Bambu's official client, Bambu Studio - but it apparently still goes through Bambu's servers for printing? How exactly does that work? Does it also "impersonate" the User-Agent, and Bambu was okay with that?
2. OrcaSlicer-bambulab: if the goal of this fork-of-a-fork is to bypass Bambu's cloud servers, why would it still need to "impersonate" the UA and communicate with Bambu's servers (as Bambu claimed)? Wouldn't the whole point be to avoid doing that in the first place?
> OrcaSlicer-bambulab: if the goal of this fork-of-a-fork is to bypass Bambu's cloud servers, why would it still need to "impersonate" the UA and communicate with Bambu's servers (as Bambu claimed)? Wouldn't the whole point be to avoid doing that in the first place?
I finally got to the bottom of this; there is a cloud-based RPC method called `bambu_network_start_local_print` where Bambu's Cloud would authorize a print using (ostensibly) only locally transferred data. The goal of this project was basically to pretend to be the Bambu plugin in order to authorize this method, which is otherwise locked behind Bambu's auth system.
The alternative is to run the printer in LAN mode (which OrcaSlicer has always supported) where the client connects natively over MQTT, but after Bambu added their cloud authentication, this requires putting the printer in Developer mode and severing the Cloud features.
Orcas Slicer is a fork of Bambu Studio, which is a fork of PrusaSlicer, itself a descendant of Slic3r.
Orca Slicer was forked to improve usability and features, not to get around any cloud printing requirements, Bamboo added those later and removed the ability to print locally.
It has to impersonate to transfer a gcode file locally, which is another open standard.
Bamboo restricted LAN printing, that is the issue.
is there case for Bambulabs breaching Direct Export Controls of dual-use technology to China? 3d printing tech is obviously dual-use. they are forcing network now, and they clearly have servers in China.
same for breach National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)
It would have been so easy for Bambu to embrace freedom and privacy and continue to enjoy our loyalty all the way to the bank, but apparently they've got to burn down what they've got.
I've got an a1 mini myself, and I'm not aware of anything comparable on the market, but there's a clear need for some competition now.
For the market overall this is great: Bambu is forcing the other manufacturers to innovate on features, ease of use and affordability in order to keep up. At the same time Bambu's antics prevent them from completely dominating. Any new printer that can compare to a Bambu (or exceed it in interesting ways) gets rewarded with customers that want anything but Bambu
It's a much more interesting and dynamic place than before Bambu's market entry
I find it interesting that many commenters here do not regard anything as 'competitive' unless it offers the same price/performance, while completely disregarding these lock-ins and privacy invasions. It seems that the reason we have all these restrictive and otherwise problematic companies is that you folks just do not assign a cost to their behaviour.
I was not aware of this behaviour when I bought it.
But you raise a good issue: are they selling these at a loss in order to leverage some sort of lock-in? If that's the reason they're so cheap, that's important to know.
I honestly wouldn't mind paying twice as much for something that's more open. But it's also an issue I haven't looked very deeply into. For my first 3d printer I just wanted something cheap and foolproof.
Most printers these days will give you good performance when you buy them. Bigger issue is how reliable it'll be after you put 1000 hours on it. Bambu Lab is the best in that regard, but many other brands will give you the results you want, you'll just need to become good at troubleshooting.
Without the AMS, a Prusa Mk4 (used?) You're always going to pay a bit more but they're European built and extremely repairable. Unfortunately you do need to pay for the Mk4 or Core to match Bambu's ease of use. The Mini is also great for occasional use if you don't need a big build volume.
The Mk3 is also easy, and can be had for cheap now, but it doesn't have auto Z-adjust which is really nice. It's also noticeably slower compared to the latest models.
Eleego Centauri Carbon is cheaper and is just plug and play. I have no experience with 3D printing and have been using it for a while with no problems or messing around with the printer.
Creality K2 Combo[1] is pretty much spec for spec a P2S. Add in OrcaSlicer (Bamboo Slicer fork), and you basically have a non-closed system P2S. I've printed 652 hours on it since December, about 4.7km worth of filament has been ran through it. Great upgrade over the Creality K1 that is sitting next to it.
Check out the qidi q2 (or the q2c depending on what you plan to print) - it reviews well compared to the p2s or even the x1c, runs fully open firmware, and is a fair bit cheaper than the bambu comparables.
I have the original CC. It’s a fine budget machine for single color - plenty fast and good quality prints.
They rubbed people the wrong way launching the CC2 with multi-color support before they developed the multi-color add-on that was promised for the original CC. I didn’t plan on multi-color with the CC, so that didn’t personally bother me too much.
I recently got a Snapmaker U1 for multi-toolhead prints and love it so far - much less waste than a filament changer and I’m using it for more exotic prints like a mix of conductive and regular PLA in a single part that wouldn’t work well in a filament changer single toolhead printer.
And I still use my CC for occasional single color prints (recently it’s been dedicated to TPU but I’m probably going to move that over to the U1 so I can do “over molded” TPU+PLA prints).
In short, if you’re willing to spend more I’d highly recommend the U1 if you know you’d benefit from the toolchanger. CC is probably a fine budget machine but there are a lot of other similar budget corexy machines to consider these days as well (I got CC when it was groundbreaking for features at its price but competition has caught up by now).
I bought it a few months ago and as a beginner in 3D printing it has been really nice. I haven't printed that much though but so far it's been really good.
I got a P1P a few years ago and haven't regretted it. A the time BL's price/performance/reliability was peerless. It really was a turn-key printer.
That said none of this is surprising. Bambu Labs have been very candid about their playbook which is following Apple's lead. They want to be the Apple of printers, a very walled garden with high integration good UX and not a lot of freedom because they want to tightly control the full experience.
And that is going to alienate a lot of people and endear a lot of others. The only reason they've even paid lip-service to open source or open hardware is simply to get a foothold in an industry that had strong roots in that area. Now that they're a more established brand we should expect them to start bricking in the garden and adding controls.
Fortunately I think they've been a net-good for the printer landscape, they shook things up pretty hard and I think there's now more competitive models from other brands.
If you don't do any 3D printing, it's hard to understand the difference between bambu labs and nearly everything else.
The Bambu printers work. Imagine the difference between windows XP and OSX. Do you guys remember the insane breath of fresh air it was to get a computer which just worked?
That's Bambu. Yeah they aren't open source there's all sorts of telemetry, etc. Nobody cares because they really just want to print things.
My understanding is that right now, you can run your printer in LAN or USB mode without Bambu's cloud, and this is supported natively by OrcaSlicer (or any slicer using USB), but you lose some of the Cloud monitoring features.
You can also use Bambu's cloud with their Cloud Connect app and gain those monitoring features while using a third-party slicer, but at the expense that you send your prints through their cloud.
Or, you can use Bambu Studio and get the "fully integrated" experience.
My understanding is that this plugin just replicated their Bambu Studio communication with the Cloud, and that it _enabled_ you to send your prints to their cloud, not _disabled_ it. Is there something I'm missing that made this valuable? (ie - did it do some hybrid where it could hack in the Cloud monitoring without sending the prints through the Cloud?) Otherwise, I think what Bambu are doing are distasteful but I don't understand all of the Chinese espionage hand-wringing or "stealing our files" commentary around this.
EDIT: I finally got to the bottom of this; there is a cloud-based RPC method called `bambu_network_start_local_print` where Bambu's Cloud would authorize a print using (ostensibly) only locally transferred data. The goal of this project was basically to pretend to be the Bambu plugin in order to authorize this method, which is otherwise locked behind Bambu's auth system. This makes more sense. I wish the commentary on this subject would actually explain this.
Some managers are fine screwing power users when they feel they are big enough. I will never buy a Chamberlain garage door opener for their similar stance against the Home Assistant community
Do they? They came to the realisation that they control a sufficient fraction of the market that your preference as a consumer no longer matters to them.
Ya at this point I mainly know Bambu from their adversarial behavior. Some friends and I put three new printers online this past month and proudly none are Bambulabs.
This feels like pressure from the state. I do not see why they would do this otherwise. If people use these printers at work, they may be willingly sending prototypes and designs to China. That would create a huge advantage, because the company could know who bought the printer, where they are located, and what they are working on. Since Chinese companies are required to comply with the government, corporate espionage seems like the most logical explanation to me.
It also enables a similar model to Facebook's insight into third party mobile app growth. The state could look for early growth trends in a given category or model type.
Then their org has the option to burnish or bury models that align with their goals.
I installed the third party X1C firmware and locked it down last year. Their whole excuse about security was nonsense then and it’s nonsense now. Every step they take pushes them closer to fully locking their printers down to be either subscription based or use their (always out of stock) filament.
Yeah, I was considering getting into 3D printing and Bambu was one of the finalists. It's good to have one less brand to think about, makes it a bit easier to decide.
They will lose relevance soon anyway. Toolchangers are the future and their offerings on the matter are kinda shitty at the moment. Their nozzle changing solution is overengineered.
I have multiple Bambu printers, and I've had no problems at all with AMS or AMS2 pro. It just works for me, even with all kinds of weird filaments. Not saying you're wrong, but my experience has been flawless.
To me, this looks like state pressure rather than a normal business decision. I cannot see a convincing reason for it otherwise. If these printers are used in professional settings, users may be unknowingly sending prototypes, designs, and internal project data to China. That kind of access would be extremely valuable, especially if the company can identify the buyer, their location, and their field of work. Given the relationship between Chinese companies and the Chinese state, corporate espionage seems like the most plausible explanation.
Don't forget that you are having the cloud hosted services generate and send executable code to a device inside your corporate firewall. I can see all kinds of potential issues corporate security would have just based on that fact alone.
I wish I could better articulate the rage I feel that is accumulating strand by strand, year by year, for the corporate over-lording, abusive, user-hostile, person-hostile practices that are rapidly normalizing across the modern capitalist playbook. I have no outlet. The pressure just builds.
> Some people are okay with using OrcaSlicer and printing through Bambu's cloud. It's convenient if you're on the road and want to start a print on your printer at home
Do such people really exist? Are there actually people who are comfortable blindly starting a robot in their home, with a part that heats to 150 C, and then hope that everything will work out and when they get home the part will be waiting for them, instead of the firefighters?
Yes, very common use case. I print things remotely from home on the printers at the office all the time, as do many of my colleagues. Probably not a common use case for people with at-home printers, but if you use them professionally people do it all the time. That said, you probably don't want bambu's cloud if you're working on protected IP...
Closer to 200C. But the gantry constraints movement, the 200C nozzle can only really touch its holder, the print bed, the filament and some metal or silicon cleaning surfaces. None of those are flamable at those temps.
Maybe if it knocks itself down to the ground? But I worry much more about faulty wiring or stuff like that. And that's more a function of the brand and model
All of the fires I've heard about 3d printing involved sketchy power supplies in some of the printers or DIY builds out there. Thermal runaway protection is really easy code to write and very common in firmware and the thermal design of the heated parts makes it hard to get there.
Not saying fires don't happen that way but let's say it's a failure mode that is a challenge to achieve intentionally much less accidentally.
Thermal runaway protection does not help in certain failure modes.
Failed FET for instance. They tend to fail "on". Unless you have a highside FET shutting off the power (and that may fail too).
On my printer I have software watchdogs but I also have an entire "dumb" (no MCU) circuit that will shut off a large relay that goes to my heaters if any of it's failsafes are triggered. I have a smoke detector, secondary thermistors, etc.
There are a bit more things in the way of thermal fuses and heaters that are less likely to runaway on the newer commercial printers but I still think people need to take the risk more serious.
I have been building printers and printing since 2011 and I still prefer to not have my printer in my house where the family sleeps, even with the failsafes. It lives out in the shop with plenty of room around/above it in case of a fire.
That isn’t a significantly different risk from how you are required to use a FDM printer, regardless of circumstance.
Prints regularly take ten+ hours to complete. No one is vigilantly guarding their printer during this time. Fire spreads so quickly in a house that a smoke alarm is often just a signal to get out, you don’t necessarily have the time to grab a fire extinguisher and put it out.
And how big is the risk, really? The materials that you use do not ignite so close to their melting point.
The main board of my 3D printer short-circuited and caught fire once. I don't know what would have happened if I wasn't around, but I'm not leaving my printer running on its own without supervision.
3D printers aren't the fire hazards of yore. They're quite reliable, fused, with multiple interlocks for various conditions (mainly around heating not matching expected rate) that will kill power.
The main potential problem these days (in my view) is whether a print finishes without crashing or delaminating from the print plate, which also has workarounds... but that's only potential printer damage, not a fire.
Pretty common for us to leave the printer unattended. The prints are 8 h or more at times and I’m definitely not watching the device. During that time I might be asleep or out of the house. I’ve never actually started a print from outside but that’s not from a safety standpoint just I’ve never needed to.
At worst the sprinklers above it will wash it but that’s in a catastrophic instance.
My P1S has a camera built into it. If the print begins to fail, I can stop the printer and turn off the heat immediately before anything spirals. Very easy and convenient to remote control from my phone.
I would never compare an inexpensive 3d printer to a household device which is designed to last decades.
It is closer to a toaster or an oven than a water heater or HVAC.
Also...my last lease specifically said that I was not allowed to use the washer/dryer or oven when I was not home. So it is not a stretch to believe that the property owners will use those types of agreements to go against you when the insurance company denies your claim (this does and has happened with 3d printer fires).
All that being said...I have run 135hr prints unattended on my printers (not bambu). The risk may be low but it is not zero and it certainly higher than a water heater or HVAC.
I don't know, do people exist who will run 220 V wiring through their house, even though a few mm of plastic separate the two wires from conflagration? Who use devices running on thousands of volts, with mere inches separating their hands from death?
Homeowners insurance rarely actually covers everything lost in a fire, and takes years to pay out in many cases. I really hope your disaster recovery plan is "insurance'll fix it".
Driving down the street is risky. Owning a home is risky. It's all a matter of degrees, and insurance doesn't deny coverage for 3D printers, QED that's what it's for.
I don't run prints when I'm not home. I have a fire suppression system in my H2S, and I had one with my A1. You only need it to fuck up once, and your house is toast.
There are people who think of the 3d printer as a toy, not as a piece of industrial (or semi industrial) equipment
There are people who are arrogant, who think they have figured out and solved anything that could possibly go wrong so they have made it safe to do
There are people who kind of think they are invincible and are just convinced that bad stuff won't happen to them
Idk. It's not a stretch at all for me to imagine this sort of person, based on the people I've met in the past. I mean people remove safety guards from power saws that are designed to protect you from losing fingers, so...
Calling out bad behavior out to get any group of people to change is dead. Nobody with any bit of power gives a fuck any more. It's really, really bad. Give as little power away as you possibly can. "Open Source" has to be end-to-end to work at all. Even a tiny bit of proprietary spice will eventually spoil the entire dish.
Bambu Lab has made plenty of mistakes, but I don't think this is one of them. And I'm a big supporter of open-source software.
Their cloud infrastructure obviously has real costs associate with running it, and I don't understand why any software other than their own should be entitled to use those resources.
If you buy something and then significantly modify it, you generally tend to void the warranty - and that's not because companies are just greedy; there are real limitations when it comes to a company's ability to support the endless ways a product could be modified.
Publishing something as open-source does not imply that you must operate an optional-but-complementary service at a loss for charity.
> I don't understand why any software other than their own should be entitled to use those resources
That's not a genuine argument, nobody "feels entitled" to anything. Bambu made a deliberate choice to architect the product this way, deliberately placed themselves in this gatekeeping position, and they're deliberately working towards removing any other form of access to our hardware.
> they're deliberately working towards removing any other form of access to our hardware
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't think that's what is happening. They aren't doing anything to block OrcaSlicer or any fork from working with the printer using LAN-only mode. It's only if you want to use Bambu Lab's servers for essentially a remote-access solution (which, by the way, kind of defeats the privacy-oriented purpose of running some of these forks) that they're saying you should use their own software.
Thought experiment: if a VPN provider offers an open-source client, and their reference implementation also includes some kind of promotional free tier of their service with limitations, are they then obligated to offer free service to every fork of the client? What if some of those forks abuse the free tier by removing limitations that their reference implementation imposes?
From watching his videos, he's an Apple guy for his personal devices, though his server infrastructure (and also the bulk of the devices he reviews and experiments with ) are Linux machines.
Internet influencers - nothing against this one, I like his videos, I think I got JetKVM because of one video - are a persona which is different from their person. They sell something in their videos and do things in videos that are different from their true self. Videos are primarily done to drive more subscribers. I don't dispute that he might be an exception but he has >1M subscribers which makes being authentic and not driven by audience difficult.
Take LTT as an extreme example.
[Edit] I'm not judging Jeff or saying this is good or bad.
I use Linux as a daily driver, write and modify kernel (mainline and out of tree) and userspace drivers, have reverse engineered various things. ie beyond most of the HN peanut gallery. That said I use an iPhone because I have a day job and nothing “open” is worth dealing with.
I use Linux as a daily driver, using it on servers since 1991 (or 92 whenever boot.tgz/root.tgz was released), have been coding for 45 years, started several successful open source projects, wrote a full text search engine in Java in the 90s before there was Lucene, wrote the core Wiki markup engine that powered Atlassian Confluence for quite some time, because Mike asked me. That said I use a Google Pixel because - after decades of using Apple (from first iBook G3, first MacBook, first iPhone, first iPod, iPod nano, first iPad, Xserve, Xsan, iMac Pro and on and on an on) I left the Apple ecosystem when Steve died - to me Apple feels too constraining.
Not sure what that exchange was for, but I like it!
PS: Not a native speaker, don't know what "HN peanut gallery" means. But I like peanuts, though I think Peanuts are overrated. Though sometimes our dog looks like Snoopy, when her ears are flying.
So, this wasn’t a dick sizing contest about who contributes to open source. The point is there is a certain extent I will go to maintain my ideals of using certain systems and it is more than average even for here (the peanut gallery), and on par with the influencer in question, ie I can relate regardless of their “inauthentic” persona. Most people, even those that consider themselves “enthusiasts”, simply won’t go to the effort of reverse engineering or writing drivers - if it were the case there would be a much larger ecosystem of high quality drivers and a larger pool of contributors. I am in that minority and still use an iPhone, and I don’t have a subscriber count.
2. A google pixel isn’t meaningfully more open than an iPhone (I depend on functionality that would be unavailable if rooted). This wasn’t meant to be an iPhone vs android debate. For the purposes of this discussion they are equivalent.
"inauthentic" is your judgement based on your values. My post was not about judgement, just about explaining what I think happens with influencers. Your reply was based on your perception and assumptions, not on what I said it feels. Most influencers use Apple if using Graphene doesn't drive subscribers.
"reverse engineering or writing drivers"
When I encountered Linux I was already too old to be interested in that kind of things. But I did disassemble C/PM code. I was interested in blue boxing, cracking of games, infinite life reverse engineering and hacking in the 80s though.
"For the purposes of this discussion they are equivalent."
Again it feels like you made some assumptions about me and what I wanted to say which are just that, assumptions.
You literally said: “They sell something in their videos and do things in videos that are different from their true self. ”
“Inauthentic” was I still think a close enough reference paraphrase of your statement.
Not a value judgement. You even used the word authentic. And in general I wouldn’t necessarily disagree but I don’t see how it is necessarily related to their choice of personal devices.
An internet celeb probably doesn’t use GrapheneOS because the limitations sucks for most people, not because of some calculated subscriber count play.
Yes I did, and you called that "inauthentic" based on your value system. I'm not a native speaker but in German "inauthentic" (unauthentisch) would not be considered a neutral description.
"So, this wasn’t a dick sizing contest"
You can say "I didn't intend this a dick sizing contest" but you can't say "This wasn't a dick sizing contest".
Again this is based on your judgement.
I like both Jeff and Apple products, but this does seem a pretty ... odd ... thing to say within the context of his audience. A normal person wouldn't bat an eye but the kind of people watching Jeff Geerling videos will probably have some strong opinions about it
Full disclosure: I've never owned a Bambu because I've never loved the idea of a "closed" ecosystem 3D printer, however I have used them, and am very familiar with the 3d printing space beyond Bambu.
For anyone considering alternatives: You should know that almost all other 3D printers expect you to know a little more about how they actually work than Bambus. Bambus are as close as you can get to a "just works" type experience, but modern alternatives from others are nowhere near as hard as they used to be.
The closest "easy" alternative is probably Prusa, but you'll pay significantly more for a Prusa machine than you would a Bambu. They're an excellent company, and the complete opposite of Bambu when it comes to Openness. If money is no object, Prusa is highly recommended.
Beyond Prusa, there's a lot of other options. https://auroratechchannel.com/#section2 This list is a good one.
I personally run an old Elegoo Neptune 4 pro - but my needs are quite low. If I were buying today, a Snapmaker U1 or the Creality K2 Plus is probably where I'd end up going.
Prusa are pretty much plug and play these days, especially the Core One line-up.
You're right that they're expensive but you get free human support 24x7, you get an open platform, lots of contributions to open source (even Bambu Studio is a fork of Prusa Slicer), and they pretty much go on forever.
My Core One+ started its life as an original MK3 and went through each iteration of upgrades, and it works like new. I'm now waiting for an INDX upgrade for it.
IMO the main drawback of consumer Prusa offerings is the lack of good chamber heating for more advanced materials. I can print PC on my Core One+ in the summer with the chamber at 45℃ (good enough for most uses, but 60 would be better), but in the winter it becomes a lot harder.
The Core One L is supposedly better in that regard but I've seen reports that it's still not ideal.
Other than that, I feel the extra cash pays itself back in the long run.
Is there any guidance on improving the Core One chamber? I would like to add some thermal insulation around the chamber, but I'm not sure if the firmware will properly detect unexpected thermal insulation in problematic scenario's, if it blindly assumes its a stock Core One... the more you modify a printer, the more it operates in terra incognita.
Could too much thermal insulation cause the bed temperature to lower (to avoid overheating chamber temp) to the point the print no longer adheres? etc.
If you could recommend some articles on the subject I would highly appreciate it.
Mine is more or less stock. I've been searching for an existing mod but haven't really found one. A good start is probably to plug all the little leakage points around the corners and unused rivet/bolt holes.
The main issue is how close the walls are to the bed, which makes a lot of insulation projects dead in the water. If a radiator reflector foil [0] can be made to fit, it might help quite a bit as well.
Other than that, proper active chamber heating is really where we should be heading. When I have the time I might attempt to replace the left panel with one.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Radiator-Reflective-Thermal-Heating...
You can insulate the chamber. That works fine. There is a vent on top which is open in case the printer needs lower temps. For everything else it will turn on the chamber fan. The parameters are tunable in the menu (or via G-Code).
We could search in the source, but I’m 99.999% sure it is a PID, because of course has to work in different environments. So I do not think it should be a problem.
Prusa is still the most 'open source-ish' choice, but they're no longer a polar opposite to Bambu, in 2023 they started making efforts to stop commercialization of their designs, stopped sharing source/design material for their PCBs, etc.
Then in 2025 they changed their 'open community license' to say users may not:
“Sell complete machines or remixes based on these files, unless you have a separate agreement…” and “The Restriction: You cannot commercially exploit the design files…”
https://blog.prusa3d.com/core-one-cad-files-release-under-th...
Maybe this is more a comment on how open source has had to change in the face of commercial exploitation of the vulnerabilities traditional open source licenses create for the businesses doing the R&D.
I've been a Prusa defender for a long time, including when they added the break-off tab to enable custom firmware which caused a lot of upset.
They're doing what it takes to be a business. I was glad when they moved to more injection molded parts instead of trying to 3D print their own parts. It was a cool idea at the start but the time for that was long past.
My only slight objection is that you can tell they're trying to have it both ways: They want all of the good will and reputation of being open source, but they're also trying hard to put as many limits on this as they can. Like all projects trying to walk the line between open and closed source, I think they're at their best when they're honest about what they're doing. The moves they made with their open license are completely reasonable and I support them, but that blog post was a bit of a letdown when they tried to make it about fighting patent trolls for the community or something. When you reach Prusa scale you have to be honest that you're no longer one and the same with the community. You are the medium-ish size business that people rely on. Taking away the right for others to sell the products is a reasonable business move, but please be honest about it rather than trying to tell us it's for our own good.
They were so deeply undercut by Chinese clone vendors that buying Prusa made little sense to consumers. They couldn't survive without banning them. The situation was similar to IBM PC, but Prusa Research was no IBM.
It’s rough but I understand it.
You can be entirely in favor of the open source ethos, even as a commercial entity, but then certain actors can take advantage of that ethos and just directly commercialize your R&D investment and take all the proceeds of your investment, whether or not they comply with attribution or share-alike requirements.
It’s tough seeing an open source project you’ve poured tons of care and effort into (and WANT people to share and remix and build cool things) get more or less “extracted” for profit without contributing back (code or money).
At the end of the day, none of it really matters unless you’ve got money and time to actually try to enforce your licenses, or have enough customer mindshare to effectively change the behavior of bad actors without needing legal action.
I’ll probably use licenses like Prusas in the future for similar reasons, even though I generally prefer to use less restrictive ones. Bad actors, or even just non-benevolent actors, can really sour the open source ethos, and it sucks but there’s no way to legally enforce “don’t be a jerk” without restricting a legal document in slightly unpalatable ways.
Nothing in Prusa's OCL stops anyone from cloning and selling their printer.
It only stops the honest people from doing that (and possibly much more, like manufacturing and selling replacement parts or mods).
Creating 3D models from existing products is relatively fast and easy. The hard parts have always been the actual design process, materials selection, and setting up the supply and manufacturing chain.
Prusa took what was practically a non-issue (cloning of their modern printers which have multiple custom parts and are overall not easy to clone cheaply anyway) and used it to restrict the freedoms of end users and small businesses while crying about how they are the victims.
I lost a lot of respect for Prusa when they came out with the OCL.
A damn patent would have been both more effective and less restrictive for reasonable commercial purposes.
What you’ve said is true but also misses the point. Licenses have never been about stopping bad actions because a bit of text can’t prevent someone from buying materials and building things, just like a speed limit sign has never stopped someone from speeding (unless they crash into it).
They ARE however deterrents to bad actions from less-than-scrupulous entities, and enforcement mechanisms against fully-unscrupulous entities.
I suspect (but will admit I am just guessing here) that Prusa would prefer not to get to the enforcement stage because it is both costly and annoying, but having that in your back pocket is, sadly, necessary in a litigious society with some number of unscrupulous actors, and the deterrent effect alone is likely enough to achieve most of their goals.
I understand your point, but to compete against bambu, I think is necessary. I still find is the best option.
It’s not problematic to restrict people from selling the thing you designed, made and sell without permission.
If I make an open source car, I don’t want someone else taking my design work, and then selling a cheaper version of my product, I want my consumers to build their own parts.
Sure, but you're comparing morality to the legal definitions in software licenses.
Different licenses are build around different philosophies, and the common open source definitions allow commercialization as long as the source & modifications you make are freely available to others. Prusa is breaking from that tradition.
Then you shouldn’t make an open-source car.
Maybe you should make a source-available car, or a car with select portions of CAD available, or something else that fits your intended business model better than open-source.
then its not open source. That's just shared cad files which mcmaster carr does.
I don’t know if bambu is easier than Prusa. Bought myself a Prusa core one, having absolutely no idea whatsoever what is 3D printing, plugged in, the included filament in, just as the 10 pages manual says, click click, and I made my first print (no internet connection, no wifi, no registration, no app).
Then I installed the app (open source in github) and started using the “cloud” services. I consider myself pretty stupid with such things, and it was absolutely the easiest thing I’ve done in 10 years.
The price is very high though. But at least you OWN the damn thing.
I have an Elegoo Centauri Carbon which is cheaper than Bambu Lab's and it has been plug and play so far. I have no experience with 3D Printing and I've been printing on it without any problems so far.
I have a P1S. Putting it together and running it was about IKEA level of difficulty. Very easy. If money weren’t a problem, which Prusa printer comes closest (assuming we’d want something like the Bambu AMS2)?
I have an Anycubic Kobra 3 V2 and it “just works”. It’s a Bambu clone but with much less safeguards (for now) and is also 1/3 the price
There are a bunch of these I’m my local makerspace and they generally work great, and are often easily used by members on the more ‘craft’ side of things who’d never hang out here. Was surprised not to see them mentioned more in the discussions around this.
I have no first-hand idea of they’re ’morally’ better than Bambu - I haven’t looked into it - but I think the folks in charge of buying them considered that.
I think the Bambu social contract is pretty clear:
- they benefit from open source software work
- we benefit from their dirt cheap top performing machines
As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me. They provide insane social value through accessibility. Before them, it was Creality with the Ender 3.
My problem with Pruša as an European is that it turns us into the equivalent of being a Chinese citizen who can't afford the Temu product they make at work. Their machines are priced more or less only for US export, and not really something most people here can reasonably buy. They even refuse to use injection moulding out of some self righteous principle, which drives the price per unit up further all the while selling less durable machines cause they're half RepRap. I take it sort of as a personal insult and I will never buy one even though I can afford it, I see it as bad value. Like buying a gold plated watch or something.
My P1P at my work is having wifi issues. I'm considering just getting a Core 1, mostly because it has an ethernet port.
I'm an open-source advocate (some would say zealot?) but I ended up buying a Bambu P1S a few months back because my research indicated that there were ways use it normally without creating a Bambu account, or using their slicer, or having to send all of your prints through their servers.
I don't have my notes in front of me, but I managed to do all of that with hardly any trouble at all. IIRC, you only had to change one setting on the printer itself, and optionally block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry. I have only used OrcaSlicer to tweak my models, mess with parameters, and send the prints to the printers.
So other than Bambu getting all heavy-handed with a legitimate open-source fork of their slicer software (which is definitely not okay), I'm not sure I'm clear on what the kerfuffle is about. Are their printers now MORE locked down than before? Or maybe only certain models?
"you only had to change one setting on the printer itself, and optionally block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry" - "only" is doing a lot of work here. Yes, this is easy for us, but that part alone is beyond most users.
I have a P1S myself, and I find Bambu to be a strange company. They're one that has benefited tremendously from OSS while sometimes violating both the ethos and licenses.
They specifically engineer it such that your prints need to go through an intermediary even when it could send it right to your device on a simple network. That'd be like a laserjet routing through the cloud instead of going to your device. With nothing much in the way of encrypting your designs and protecting your data, it feels like this was done on purpose. Given the shameless track record of many (most?) Chinese companies on IP, my assumption is that they're mainly doing this to steal designs. The juxtaposition of their poor track record on OSS, what seems like a shady approach to privacy and IP protection, and the aggressive legal posturing - all sum up to what I think is a very untrustworthy organization.
Luckily my designs are in the "look at this trash" territory, so I don't have anything to worry about, but I certainly wouldn't use this for important work.
You're obviously not an open source advocate or zealot if you gave up your principles so easily.
Funny how fast people forget. LAN mode was NOT part of their original plan until outrage like this happened last time. They shifted their course and changed their blog post after. Putting pressure as a customer is how you steer company’s direction.
That’s good in theory but there are also plenty of counter examples of companies forcing features and still making it by just sheer brand reputation or market share (HP still has DRM’d ink, Keurig is still going after “hacks”) or just money (OpenAI promised to open source their model).
I’m not saying we shouldn’t shame those companies for not abiding to their words, but there is more to it than outrage. Suing them (or the threat of) might also work here if they really went against the license.
Also, LAN mode is NOT a substitute for the functionality you bought the printer with.
My biggest annoyance is that I can no longer use OrcaSlicer to interact with my printers (e.g. sync filaments) and start prints remotely. I am still very annoyed at Bambu Labs for this stupid move, as it directly impacts my usage.
What most people seem to be missing in these discussions is that some of us have printers in remote workshops, not next to us. So all the "LAN" or "Developer" options aren't great, especially if you have to pick between those OR the cloud.
I am an outsider on the details of the Bambu software requiring to go through their servers and closed software.
Still I suspect it is about spying, Bambu printers are at the core of the Ukrainian war effort, the reason Ukraine is winning since januari.
First China prevented Ukraine from using any of the drones that they sold in millions to Russia while exercising the built in kill switches in Chinese drones used in by Ukrainians.
Suddenly Bambu, another Chinese company started listening in on the 3D printing on a massive scale in secret factories all over Ukraine that make the drones to replace the Chinese drones. Very suspicious.
Whatever is the reason Bambu locks down software or firmware on their 3D printers, now is the time for programmers to change the situation. We need to put up money like Louis Rossmann did [1], not to fight legal battles but for a assembly language programmer to reverse engineer the Bambu firmware and make a free and open source version.
This firmware replacement will cost a couple of months to write so we all should send that programmer a little money so he/she can release it for free.
A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.
Now is the chance for us outsiders to help Ukraine, by freeing Bambu firmware.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLLVn6XT7v0
P.S. I would be willing to do the reverse engineering but I would need at least 35 euro per day (to eat) to build a new firmware for all Bambu models from scratch. I would need a few different models of printers on loan for a few weeks to test the new firmware. I estimate it would take 5-9 months to rebuild firmware for all models from zero and release it. Maybe Rossmann and Geerling could use their influence and coördinate this freeing of the firmware?
I just emailed Rosmann and Geering to see if we together can free the Bambu firmware. Anyone who wants to help, please contact me trough my HN profile.
Bambu had its requirement to go through their servers since before the Ukraine war, though it has gotten progressively harder to work around.
There is still no hard requirement that you go through their servers. The printers support a mode where they can only be accessed from the local network.
...nope...?
the Ukraine war started in 2014 technically. But even if we go to the "current" wave start, that was 24 February 2022[0].
Bambu Labs released their first printer (X1C, on kickstarter) on 31 May 2022, let alone their "must go through cloud service" restriction starting in early 2025[1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war
[1]: https://blog.bambulab.com/firmware-update-introducing-new-au...
Lot of conspiracy theory and misinformation in this comment.
I'm not up to date with their latest printers, but the Bambu printers used during this timeframe have easy ways to enable LAN only mode. You can leave it disconnected from the network entirely and use an SD card, too.
The app lets you enable root access and install firmware mods. There are multiple efforts to reverse engineer the firmware.
Please provide sources to your claims.
I couldn't find a source for China disabling drones it sold to Ukraine, but they did cut off drone exports to Ukraine, while still supplying them to Russia:
https://www.newsweek.com/china-ukraine-russia-war-drone-uav-...
> This firmware replacement will cost a couple of months to write so we all should send that programmer a little money so he/she can release it for free.
> A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.
If that were true, it seems to me, that Ukraine would have already done it if it was somehow standing in their way.
Or just put your file on an sd card and plug it physically into the printer?
Makes fleet management a bit harder but I don’t believe that requires internet access unless I missed some update.
"It pretended to be the official client" is not a security argument if the mechanism was client-supplied metadata.
That’s not impersonation. That’s Bambu discovering that user agents are not authentication.
And by using AGPL they grant you the license to use the code however you wish, they cannot say it's "unauthorized access".
Yes you can use the code however you want but equally they are free to bar anyone they wish from accessing their servers. These are completely orthogonal issues in a legal sense.
They're essentially saying "yes, the code is open source, but you're not allowed to modify it or we'll ban you and threaten you with legal action", which is completely antithetical to the whole idea behind open source (especially the GPL which literally says in the license text itself that it was created to protect your right to run modified software). "Violation of the open source social contract" is a good way to describe it.
You're correct of course that this is an entirely distinct argument from what Bambu's legally allowed to do under existing law.
You can run modified software per the GPL but that does not include the right to connect to Bambu's servers with your modified software. That is entirely reasonable (especially since this is not some social/messaging application). If I release a client as open source, that doesn't mean it's OK for modified clients to connect to my server. I expect you to use it offline or set up your own server to connect to.
I don't know if that is what is happening here because the article is talking about a fork that is bypassing Bambu's servers entirely (which is permitted under the AGPL).
They can bar people from accessing their servers if they do so by rewriting the entire slicer to be closed source and then implementing some actual security, instead of literally giving you the means of access AND the permission to use and modify it as you wish.
Any instance anywhere that a court has considered an UA sufficient for access control? Especially one published under a copyleft license?
Techies like us get caught up in mechanism all the time in discussions like this.
But, though there are some explicit laws where that’s how it works, that’s not generally how the legal system works. If I have a private server, and I don’t give you permission to access it - or, even better, tell you not to, it doesn’t really matter how I secure it. If you access it, you’re in the wrong.
To give a physical analogy, it doesn’t matter how I’ve secured my house. Even if the door is open, you’re not allowed to just waltz in (or, to take it a bit further, come in and start using my stuff).
Spoofing a User-Agent by itself is not illegal. Browsers, curl, bots, monitoring tools, and privacy tools do this constantly for legitimate reasons.
The legal risk comes from why you are doing it and what protections you are bypassing.
If you are doing it specifically to bypass Bambu's authorized access, then it is very likely to fall afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The mechanism (spoofing the UA) is entirely incidental to the motivation (bypass authorized access), which is what the law cares about.
I don't think courts basically ever settle narrow technical questions like that. Any court decision would carry with it particular baggage based on the rest of the specifics, so I don't think it would have established a clear precedent either way.
The funny part here is it seems Bambu is more exposed to a libel suit than the developer is for... checks notes clicking 'Fork' on Bambu's github. Since the moment he did that, his software was supposedly in breach of Bambu's...expectations.
Thanks, would have been surprised, was mainly asking because OP was mentioning legal concerns. This may be a case for their EULA, sure, but I would have been surprised if there was any legal precedent or grounding for such a statement.
weev got convicted for something pretty similar to this. His conviction was vacated, but he did spend time in prison for unauthorized access to an AT&T server that only required a specific user agent and a guessable numeric device ID number.
At least in the US, the law against unauthorized access to a computer system has no requirements for how good the security has to be. If you should reasonably know you're not supposed to be using it, that's potentially enough to make it illegal.
Yes, but not bully the people sharing AGPL code. I would like to see how they do it.
And their freedom to bar people from connecting to their servers is orthogonal to their bullshit legal threats aimed at the developer.
"You can't use any client you want because of security" is bullshit, as if hackers will care what client you'd like them to use or not when they're trying to hack your infrastructure.
This is just Bambu alienating their customer base, again.
“But I checked the evil bit and it was off!!!” (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt)
Or it's a really blatant security issue that should be reported https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/10681
This sentence is Bambu Lab's blog post is wild:
> We have documented incidents of service outages caused precisely by spikes in unauthorized traffic - overwhelming the servers, causing service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users.
So it's a problem that their printers are popular, and they can't be bothered to scale their infra, so let's gate everything based on USER AGENT STRING! This is so crazy of an excuse that I don't believe it.
I guess if it's a security issue, it's a security issue: https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/10681
So am I understanding correctly that all of this "unauthorized traffic" was their customers...using their product?
I bought my bambu labs ps1 about 4 years ago now. I have never connected it to the internet. I've never printed from bambu slicer. I've always exported the gcode and manually placed it into the machine. It's been a nuisance and I'd never recommend Bambu to anyone else because of this. I knew they were collecting from the beginning and I CHOOSE to do it this way, which is incredibly sad. Our data has a lot of value and I refuse to be monitored. I just wish more people would choose to push back.
Was about to pull the trigger on a P2S. Now I'm not.
Bambu Studio is literally a PrusaSlicer fork. You don't get to build on the community and then threaten it.
I don't disagree with Bambu from an operational standpoint, but disagree with their handling of this.
They are offering a cloud infrastructure that allows users to remote control the printer via their software. If they don't want users to use a non-approved software to access their cloud, they should just build auth around it and explicitly tell people that. The accessibility for users to utilize the printer without going through official software and cloud is a whole other can of worms of course.
This whole fiasco could have been avoided by not being so confrontational, giving their user base ideological ammo.
What's most surprising to me is that this is coming from a company that directly markets towards hackers and makers.
Like when you think of the App/Play store lockdowns, the new ReCaptcha attestation stuff, and other things that have a more authoritarian angle to it as of late, you can at least see how it happens: most of their consumers aren't technical and don't even know how to argue against it or why they should care.
With Bambu on the other hand, I'd think a good portion of its customers do actively care about this kind of thing. 3D printing just doesn't have the same market reach as computers and smartphones.
Also, it seems to me like there's eventually going to be a turning of the tide on all of these pushes (app stores included) and companies that are making these kinds of moves aren't seeing that writing on the wall.
Anyways, yeah, my next purchase will be a Prusa.
A User Agent not being suitable for any kind of authorisation aside, given this was published under AGPL, is any kind of legal action even possible? Or is this like DMCA abuse, technically not grounded in any legal basis (and in the case of knowingly filing an improper DMCA claim, clearly illegal but never prosecuted) and solely a scare/might makes right tactic?
The license isn't the issue. It's the User Agreement. Bambu is claiming that the fork is allowing, enabling, (and/or promoting, encouraging, etc) users to violate the agreement with Bambu to not use their cloud with third party software.
I'm fairly certain user agreements have been used for suing makers of game cheats and other similar things. Certainly in the industry I work in, there was a company making third party software and integrating it with the industry standard tool without going through the official channels, which caused people to violate the user agreement when used. They got sued and settled.
Related topic from 2 days ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084432
Bamboo not understanding the OS licencing when they themselves took from Prusa if I remember correct is pretty rich.
I own a H2C and have been a huge fan of bambu for a few years, full disclosure.
I don't really see why everyone is up in arms about this. You are able to print in LAN mode or directly through USB drives without going through bambus servers.
Their slicer is open source but it downloads a plugin once you launch it if you choose to which is closed sourced that interacts with their APIs.
Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.
To me, the problem with all of this is that it seems strange to want the plugin when bambu will just shut off their resources to unsigned versions of the network plugin if the orca slicer dev got their way.
I'm open to being convinced but I just don't think the cross-section of people who want this would actually want prints going through bambus cloud so this effort really feels vain.
It also feels like bad framing as well because every post I see about this thing really tries to blur the line and claim this plugin and orca slicer are one and the same.
The plugin wasn't reverse engineered. The interface with the plugin was AGPL so you can freely use it in any other AGPL software.
IANAL
> Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.
The GPLv3 specifically was written to address a problem called "TiVo-ization", which is when a hardware vendor uses some trick (DRM, proprietary blobs, whatever) to prevent users from actually running modified versions of the software.
The AGPL, the license of this particular software, extends the GPLv3 with protections for users of network services:
> Simply put, the AGPLv3 is effectively the GPLv3, but with an additional licensing term that ensures that users who interact over a network with modified versions of the program can receive the source code for that program. In both licenses, sections four through six provide the terms that give users the right to receive the source code of a program.
https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2021/fall/the-fundamentals-of-t...
And on TiVo-ization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
The Linux and proprietary drivers situation is more complicated, but proprietary drivers on Linux are generally restricted to interfaces that Linux chooses to expose to them for that purpose. But the Linux kernel seems to take a narrower view of what constitutes a derivative work than was likely intended by the FSF in writing the GPL. Under a "traditional" reading of the GPL, those proprietary drivers are meant to be illegal. Whether some or all of the linking done by proprietary drivers in the Linux kernel is really allowed by the GPL or not is somewhat untested, I think.
You have LAN mode only because everyone was up in arms the first time. LAN mode was not part of the plan at first and Bambulab was forced to offer after “listening to their customer”.
But they complied?
Correction is much harder than starting off on the right side.
Sure, but the op is saying “i don’t get why everyone is up in arms”. Without the up in arms you don’t get the correction. Which is why people are up in arms - to get them to further correct.
Correction is one of many signals, and it’s better than ignoring pushback, but it’s still usually worse than not needing the correction in the first place.
Sure, a manufacturer that didn’t need to course correct yet doesn’t mean they won’t change their stance in the future, but the same is true for one that already course-corrected.
We see this with privacy eroding laws continually - legislators will “listen” and course correct if there’s pushback, only to reintroduce the bill in the next legislative session, repeatedly, until it gets passed.
I’d prefer the one that hasn’t yet signaled a desire to do something negative in the past to one that has, even if they walked it back later.
I actually disagree.
Someone who isn’t racist because they grew up in a progressive family just means they were lucky. They often have never been tested under pressure.
On the other hand, someone who grew up in a racist family and ends up not racist means their beliefs are battle tested. This is a real test of character — it also tells me how they process information.
What you’re describing is a third case where someone pretends to correct but has no intention to, which I do not think Bambu’s original act of opening of LAN access qualifies.
Now I think the other dimension here is that people are expecting Bambu to believe in open source. They might not actually, which is their own opinion to have, but that’s a different problem altogether. I believe in local access but not necessarily open sourcing of everything so from my PoV, Bambu’s stance is perfectly consistent.
> It also feels like bad framing as well because every post I see about this thing really tries to blur the line and claim this plugin and orca slicer are one and the same.
Doesn't it sounds weird to you? I mean, what the reason they have to blur the line? Are they just clueless? Or maybe they fight for some political reason, like an anti-corporate stance, and Bambu is just a convenient target for them?
I'm asking, what you think of them, because I can't understand you. Your take on the conflict is incompatible with behavior of the people opposing Bambu. Or rather it leaves no good explanations for their behavior. When I notice it, I start digging, because if the situation doesn't have a good explanation, it means I do not understand the situation. But you just accept your understanding, so you have some good explanation for people's behavior?
Everyone is up in arms because this is not the first shady thing bambulab does (like patenting prior art). And probably not the last.
> I don't really see why everyone is up in arms about this. You are able to print in LAN mode or directly through USB drives without going through bambus servers.
This is in no way equivalent. You can't sync filaments, you can't monitor printers in your slicer, you can't monitor prints from your phone. This is like going backwards at least 5 years.
I find this shallow take really annoying, as it tends to derail most discussions ("you have LAN mode, so what are you complaining about").
Regardless of the license if they only want their own software interacting with their cloud API, I don't really care because USB and LAN are there. That is ample ability to interact with the machine.
Plenty of situations would make me feel differently, but I'm fine with their restrictions in this case.
Bambu has proven time and again that they don't understand security. Unless, of course, it's theater and by design because real security would be inconvenient to state actors. Regardless, they gaslight and bludgeon those who wish to use the hardware they purchased in peace offline and away from prying eyes.
Having said all that, the hardware is very good. Software, not so much.
Good article, but I'd like to ask about two small technical details (I've used Bambu before, but I'm not very familiar with the 3D printing ecosystem).
1. OrcaSlicer: so it's a fork of Bambu's official client, Bambu Studio - but it apparently still goes through Bambu's servers for printing? How exactly does that work? Does it also "impersonate" the User-Agent, and Bambu was okay with that?
2. OrcaSlicer-bambulab: if the goal of this fork-of-a-fork is to bypass Bambu's cloud servers, why would it still need to "impersonate" the UA and communicate with Bambu's servers (as Bambu claimed)? Wouldn't the whole point be to avoid doing that in the first place?
> OrcaSlicer-bambulab: if the goal of this fork-of-a-fork is to bypass Bambu's cloud servers, why would it still need to "impersonate" the UA and communicate with Bambu's servers (as Bambu claimed)? Wouldn't the whole point be to avoid doing that in the first place?
I finally got to the bottom of this; there is a cloud-based RPC method called `bambu_network_start_local_print` where Bambu's Cloud would authorize a print using (ostensibly) only locally transferred data. The goal of this project was basically to pretend to be the Bambu plugin in order to authorize this method, which is otherwise locked behind Bambu's auth system.
The alternative is to run the printer in LAN mode (which OrcaSlicer has always supported) where the client connects natively over MQTT, but after Bambu added their cloud authentication, this requires putting the printer in Developer mode and severing the Cloud features.
Orcas Slicer is a fork of Bambu Studio, which is a fork of PrusaSlicer, itself a descendant of Slic3r.
Orca Slicer was forked to improve usability and features, not to get around any cloud printing requirements, Bamboo added those later and removed the ability to print locally.
It has to impersonate to transfer a gcode file locally, which is another open standard.
Bamboo restricted LAN printing, that is the issue.
is there case for Bambulabs breaching Direct Export Controls of dual-use technology to China? 3d printing tech is obviously dual-use. they are forcing network now, and they clearly have servers in China.
same for breach National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)
? They are a Chinese company
they have office in Austin Texas, sell products and services to USA, and GitHub itself is USA service (not sure if available in China).
point: they enfrocing network access for their products (including USA), which are sensitive. so, maybe export control problems?
We have a Bambu Lab P2S at work. I was considering to buy one myself, because of the ease of use and relative affordability.
What printers are similarly priced and have similar specs, for someone relatively new to 3D printing?
> What printers are similarly priced and have similar specs, for someone relatively new to 3D printing?
None, really. Prusa printers are good enough though. If you value freedom and privacy, its worth a few extra dollars.
It would have been so easy for Bambu to embrace freedom and privacy and continue to enjoy our loyalty all the way to the bank, but apparently they've got to burn down what they've got.
I've got an a1 mini myself, and I'm not aware of anything comparable on the market, but there's a clear need for some competition now.
For the market overall this is great: Bambu is forcing the other manufacturers to innovate on features, ease of use and affordability in order to keep up. At the same time Bambu's antics prevent them from completely dominating. Any new printer that can compare to a Bambu (or exceed it in interesting ways) gets rewarded with customers that want anything but Bambu
It's a much more interesting and dynamic place than before Bambu's market entry
I find it interesting that many commenters here do not regard anything as 'competitive' unless it offers the same price/performance, while completely disregarding these lock-ins and privacy invasions. It seems that the reason we have all these restrictive and otherwise problematic companies is that you folks just do not assign a cost to their behaviour.
I was not aware of this behaviour when I bought it.
But you raise a good issue: are they selling these at a loss in order to leverage some sort of lock-in? If that's the reason they're so cheap, that's important to know.
I honestly wouldn't mind paying twice as much for something that's more open. But it's also an issue I haven't looked very deeply into. For my first 3d printer I just wanted something cheap and foolproof.
> None, really.
Have you looked into Centauri Carbon ?
I've been told about the Snapmaker U1, but I haven't tested it. More expensive than a Bambu but cheaper than a Prusa (I think)
Most printers these days will give you good performance when you buy them. Bigger issue is how reliable it'll be after you put 1000 hours on it. Bambu Lab is the best in that regard, but many other brands will give you the results you want, you'll just need to become good at troubleshooting.
Without the AMS, a Prusa Mk4 (used?) You're always going to pay a bit more but they're European built and extremely repairable. Unfortunately you do need to pay for the Mk4 or Core to match Bambu's ease of use. The Mini is also great for occasional use if you don't need a big build volume.
The Mk3 is also easy, and can be had for cheap now, but it doesn't have auto Z-adjust which is really nice. It's also noticeably slower compared to the latest models.
Eleego Centauri Carbon is cheaper and is just plug and play. I have no experience with 3D printing and have been using it for a while with no problems or messing around with the printer.
Creality K2 Combo[1] is pretty much spec for spec a P2S. Add in OrcaSlicer (Bamboo Slicer fork), and you basically have a non-closed system P2S. I've printed 652 hours on it since December, about 4.7km worth of filament has been ran through it. Great upgrade over the Creality K1 that is sitting next to it.
[1] https://store.creality.com/products/k2-k2-combo-3d-printer-l...
Check out the qidi q2 (or the q2c depending on what you plan to print) - it reviews well compared to the p2s or even the x1c, runs fully open firmware, and is a fair bit cheaper than the bambu comparables.
Prusa: Probably less reliable/weaker UX, but good enough. Raise3D: Similar reliability, but more expensive.
Prusa, but it's more expensive.
What about Elegoo Centauri Carbon? I've had my eye on this for some time.
I have the original CC. It’s a fine budget machine for single color - plenty fast and good quality prints.
They rubbed people the wrong way launching the CC2 with multi-color support before they developed the multi-color add-on that was promised for the original CC. I didn’t plan on multi-color with the CC, so that didn’t personally bother me too much.
I recently got a Snapmaker U1 for multi-toolhead prints and love it so far - much less waste than a filament changer and I’m using it for more exotic prints like a mix of conductive and regular PLA in a single part that wouldn’t work well in a filament changer single toolhead printer.
And I still use my CC for occasional single color prints (recently it’s been dedicated to TPU but I’m probably going to move that over to the U1 so I can do “over molded” TPU+PLA prints).
In short, if you’re willing to spend more I’d highly recommend the U1 if you know you’d benefit from the toolchanger. CC is probably a fine budget machine but there are a lot of other similar budget corexy machines to consider these days as well (I got CC when it was groundbreaking for features at its price but competition has caught up by now).
> for single color
They released the multi color system for $55. I've ordered and waiting for it but the printer itself has been pretty nice.
I bought it a few months ago and as a beginner in 3D printing it has been really nice. I haven't printed that much though but so far it's been really good.
I got a P1P a few years ago and haven't regretted it. A the time BL's price/performance/reliability was peerless. It really was a turn-key printer.
That said none of this is surprising. Bambu Labs have been very candid about their playbook which is following Apple's lead. They want to be the Apple of printers, a very walled garden with high integration good UX and not a lot of freedom because they want to tightly control the full experience.
And that is going to alienate a lot of people and endear a lot of others. The only reason they've even paid lip-service to open source or open hardware is simply to get a foothold in an industry that had strong roots in that area. Now that they're a more established brand we should expect them to start bricking in the garden and adding controls.
Fortunately I think they've been a net-good for the printer landscape, they shook things up pretty hard and I think there's now more competitive models from other brands.
Hacker News - the place where shills love to make reasonable sounding arguments.
If you don't do any 3D printing, it's hard to understand the difference between bambu labs and nearly everything else.
The Bambu printers work. Imagine the difference between windows XP and OSX. Do you guys remember the insane breath of fresh air it was to get a computer which just worked?
That's Bambu. Yeah they aren't open source there's all sorts of telemetry, etc. Nobody cares because they really just want to print things.
What did `orcaslicer-bambulab` actually do?
My understanding is that right now, you can run your printer in LAN or USB mode without Bambu's cloud, and this is supported natively by OrcaSlicer (or any slicer using USB), but you lose some of the Cloud monitoring features.
You can also use Bambu's cloud with their Cloud Connect app and gain those monitoring features while using a third-party slicer, but at the expense that you send your prints through their cloud.
Or, you can use Bambu Studio and get the "fully integrated" experience.
My understanding is that this plugin just replicated their Bambu Studio communication with the Cloud, and that it _enabled_ you to send your prints to their cloud, not _disabled_ it. Is there something I'm missing that made this valuable? (ie - did it do some hybrid where it could hack in the Cloud monitoring without sending the prints through the Cloud?) Otherwise, I think what Bambu are doing are distasteful but I don't understand all of the Chinese espionage hand-wringing or "stealing our files" commentary around this.
EDIT: I finally got to the bottom of this; there is a cloud-based RPC method called `bambu_network_start_local_print` where Bambu's Cloud would authorize a print using (ostensibly) only locally transferred data. The goal of this project was basically to pretend to be the Bambu plugin in order to authorize this method, which is otherwise locked behind Bambu's auth system. This makes more sense. I wish the commentary on this subject would actually explain this.
I honestly don't get it. They have more to win by doing things right than with this crap they pull out . Never getting a Bambulab.
Some managers are fine screwing power users when they feel they are big enough. I will never buy a Chamberlain garage door opener for their similar stance against the Home Assistant community
Which garage door opener brands / models would you recommend?
I am sufficiently paranoid that I think this is drone part detection from the Chinese government.
This is the second comment that has mentioned this. I tried googling, and I found YouTube videos of Ukrainians using Bambu to make drone parts.
Is there any more to read about this angle? China blocking Ukraine's access to the tech?
Do they? They came to the realisation that they control a sufficient fraction of the market that your preference as a consumer no longer matters to them.
Ya at this point I mainly know Bambu from their adversarial behavior. Some friends and I put three new printers online this past month and proudly none are Bambulabs.
This feels like pressure from the state. I do not see why they would do this otherwise. If people use these printers at work, they may be willingly sending prototypes and designs to China. That would create a huge advantage, because the company could know who bought the printer, where they are located, and what they are working on. Since Chinese companies are required to comply with the government, corporate espionage seems like the most logical explanation to me.
It also enables a similar model to Facebook's insight into third party mobile app growth. The state could look for early growth trends in a given category or model type.
Then their org has the option to burnish or bury models that align with their goals.
I installed the third party X1C firmware and locked it down last year. Their whole excuse about security was nonsense then and it’s nonsense now. Every step they take pushes them closer to fully locking their printers down to be either subscription based or use their (always out of stock) filament.
Yeah, I was considering getting into 3D printing and Bambu was one of the finalists. It's good to have one less brand to think about, makes it a bit easier to decide.
They will lose relevance soon anyway. Toolchangers are the future and their offerings on the matter are kinda shitty at the moment. Their nozzle changing solution is overengineered.
Aside from orca slicers issues
Bambus p2s and their ams2 pro have had more hardware reliability issues in 1 month than is normal
Wayyyy more than my p1s and ams combo
I think there’s also some issue in their firmware that needs to be rolled back or perhaps properly tested
Gonna sound harsh :
This isn’t a printer anymore … it’s AI slop
I have multiple Bambu printers, and I've had no problems at all with AMS or AMS2 pro. It just works for me, even with all kinds of weird filaments. Not saying you're wrong, but my experience has been flawless.
To me, this looks like state pressure rather than a normal business decision. I cannot see a convincing reason for it otherwise. If these printers are used in professional settings, users may be unknowingly sending prototypes, designs, and internal project data to China. That kind of access would be extremely valuable, especially if the company can identify the buyer, their location, and their field of work. Given the relationship between Chinese companies and the Chinese state, corporate espionage seems like the most plausible explanation.
Don't forget that you are having the cloud hosted services generate and send executable code to a device inside your corporate firewall. I can see all kinds of potential issues corporate security would have just based on that fact alone.
I wish I could better articulate the rage I feel that is accumulating strand by strand, year by year, for the corporate over-lording, abusive, user-hostile, person-hostile practices that are rapidly normalizing across the modern capitalist playbook. I have no outlet. The pressure just builds.
> Some people are okay with using OrcaSlicer and printing through Bambu's cloud. It's convenient if you're on the road and want to start a print on your printer at home
Do such people really exist? Are there actually people who are comfortable blindly starting a robot in their home, with a part that heats to 150 C, and then hope that everything will work out and when they get home the part will be waiting for them, instead of the firefighters?
Yes, very common use case. I print things remotely from home on the printers at the office all the time, as do many of my colleagues. Probably not a common use case for people with at-home printers, but if you use them professionally people do it all the time. That said, you probably don't want bambu's cloud if you're working on protected IP...
Closer to 200C. But the gantry constraints movement, the 200C nozzle can only really touch its holder, the print bed, the filament and some metal or silicon cleaning surfaces. None of those are flamable at those temps.
Maybe if it knocks itself down to the ground? But I worry much more about faulty wiring or stuff like that. And that's more a function of the brand and model
All of the fires I've heard about 3d printing involved sketchy power supplies in some of the printers or DIY builds out there. Thermal runaway protection is really easy code to write and very common in firmware and the thermal design of the heated parts makes it hard to get there.
Not saying fires don't happen that way but let's say it's a failure mode that is a challenge to achieve intentionally much less accidentally.
Thermal runaway protection does not help in certain failure modes.
Failed FET for instance. They tend to fail "on". Unless you have a highside FET shutting off the power (and that may fail too).
On my printer I have software watchdogs but I also have an entire "dumb" (no MCU) circuit that will shut off a large relay that goes to my heaters if any of it's failsafes are triggered. I have a smoke detector, secondary thermistors, etc.
There are a bit more things in the way of thermal fuses and heaters that are less likely to runaway on the newer commercial printers but I still think people need to take the risk more serious.
I have been building printers and printing since 2011 and I still prefer to not have my printer in my house where the family sleeps, even with the failsafes. It lives out in the shop with plenty of room around/above it in case of a fire.
That isn’t a significantly different risk from how you are required to use a FDM printer, regardless of circumstance.
Prints regularly take ten+ hours to complete. No one is vigilantly guarding their printer during this time. Fire spreads so quickly in a house that a smoke alarm is often just a signal to get out, you don’t necessarily have the time to grab a fire extinguisher and put it out.
And how big is the risk, really? The materials that you use do not ignite so close to their melting point.
The main board of my 3D printer short-circuited and caught fire once. I don't know what would have happened if I wasn't around, but I'm not leaving my printer running on its own without supervision.
3D printers aren't the fire hazards of yore. They're quite reliable, fused, with multiple interlocks for various conditions (mainly around heating not matching expected rate) that will kill power.
The main potential problem these days (in my view) is whether a print finishes without crashing or delaminating from the print plate, which also has workarounds... but that's only potential printer damage, not a fire.
Pretty common for us to leave the printer unattended. The prints are 8 h or more at times and I’m definitely not watching the device. During that time I might be asleep or out of the house. I’ve never actually started a print from outside but that’s not from a safety standpoint just I’ve never needed to.
At worst the sprinklers above it will wash it but that’s in a catastrophic instance.
My P1S has a camera built into it. If the print begins to fail, I can stop the printer and turn off the heat immediately before anything spirals. Very easy and convenient to remote control from my phone.
Does your house have an HVAC system? Water heater?
I would never compare an inexpensive 3d printer to a household device which is designed to last decades.
It is closer to a toaster or an oven than a water heater or HVAC.
Also...my last lease specifically said that I was not allowed to use the washer/dryer or oven when I was not home. So it is not a stretch to believe that the property owners will use those types of agreements to go against you when the insurance company denies your claim (this does and has happened with 3d printer fires).
All that being said...I have run 135hr prints unattended on my printers (not bambu). The risk may be low but it is not zero and it certainly higher than a water heater or HVAC.
These people exist.
I do this occasionally, but am fine with using Bambu's integrated Slicer and Remote Control software. It works well enough.
I don't know, do people exist who will run 220 V wiring through their house, even though a few mm of plastic separate the two wires from conflagration? Who use devices running on thousands of volts, with mere inches separating their hands from death?
Perhaps one or two.
That's what homeowner's insurance is for. I often run my printer when I'm not home.
Homeowners insurance rarely actually covers everything lost in a fire, and takes years to pay out in many cases. I really hope your disaster recovery plan is "insurance'll fix it".
> That's what homeowner's insurance is for
This mentality is baffling to me. No, insurance isn't there so you can knowingly do risky things, it's there in case something accidentally happens.
Would you say the same about juggling chainsaws? "That's what health insurance is for"?
Absolutely crazy to me
Driving down the street is risky. Owning a home is risky. It's all a matter of degrees, and insurance doesn't deny coverage for 3D printers, QED that's what it's for.
I don't run prints when I'm not home. I have a fire suppression system in my H2S, and I had one with my A1. You only need it to fuck up once, and your house is toast.
I think this sort of person definitely exists
There are people who are simply careless
There are people who think of the 3d printer as a toy, not as a piece of industrial (or semi industrial) equipment
There are people who are arrogant, who think they have figured out and solved anything that could possibly go wrong so they have made it safe to do
There are people who kind of think they are invincible and are just convinced that bad stuff won't happen to them
Idk. It's not a stretch at all for me to imagine this sort of person, based on the people I've met in the past. I mean people remove safety guards from power saws that are designed to protect you from losing fingers, so...
Calling out bad behavior out to get any group of people to change is dead. Nobody with any bit of power gives a fuck any more. It's really, really bad. Give as little power away as you possibly can. "Open Source" has to be end-to-end to work at all. Even a tiny bit of proprietary spice will eventually spoil the entire dish.
Bambu Lab has made plenty of mistakes, but I don't think this is one of them. And I'm a big supporter of open-source software.
Their cloud infrastructure obviously has real costs associate with running it, and I don't understand why any software other than their own should be entitled to use those resources.
If you buy something and then significantly modify it, you generally tend to void the warranty - and that's not because companies are just greedy; there are real limitations when it comes to a company's ability to support the endless ways a product could be modified.
Publishing something as open-source does not imply that you must operate an optional-but-complementary service at a loss for charity.
> I don't understand why any software other than their own should be entitled to use those resources
That's not a genuine argument, nobody "feels entitled" to anything. Bambu made a deliberate choice to architect the product this way, deliberately placed themselves in this gatekeeping position, and they're deliberately working towards removing any other form of access to our hardware.
> they're deliberately working towards removing any other form of access to our hardware
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't think that's what is happening. They aren't doing anything to block OrcaSlicer or any fork from working with the printer using LAN-only mode. It's only if you want to use Bambu Lab's servers for essentially a remote-access solution (which, by the way, kind of defeats the privacy-oriented purpose of running some of these forks) that they're saying you should use their own software.
Thought experiment: if a VPN provider offers an open-source client, and their reference implementation also includes some kind of promotional free tier of their service with limitations, are they then obligated to offer free service to every fork of the client? What if some of those forks abuse the free tier by removing limitations that their reference implementation imposes?
> I'm one of those crazy ones who likes to own something they purchased, and not have the company watch everything I do with hardware I paid for.
What phone and laptop does Jeff use?
"Likes to own" implies "cannot always own".
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
From watching his videos, he's an Apple guy for his personal devices, though his server infrastructure (and also the bulk of the devices he reviews and experiments with ) are Linux machines.
Well, cause the current linux phone ecosystem is a wasteland.
Pine sucked all the oxygen out of the environment, with a shit dead-on-arrival product. Pinephone doent even work as a bloody phone.
Other Linux phones are 2-3 generations old, and priced at $700 or so.
So, we're stuck with Apple or Google. Not great choices either way.
does his phone/laptop choice detract from the points being made in the post regarding bambu?
I'm guessing a Pixel with GrapheneOS
And I'm guessing an iPhone.
Internet influencers - nothing against this one, I like his videos, I think I got JetKVM because of one video - are a persona which is different from their person. They sell something in their videos and do things in videos that are different from their true self. Videos are primarily done to drive more subscribers. I don't dispute that he might be an exception but he has >1M subscribers which makes being authentic and not driven by audience difficult.
Take LTT as an extreme example.
[Edit] I'm not judging Jeff or saying this is good or bad.
I use Linux as a daily driver, write and modify kernel (mainline and out of tree) and userspace drivers, have reverse engineered various things. ie beyond most of the HN peanut gallery. That said I use an iPhone because I have a day job and nothing “open” is worth dealing with.
I use Linux as a daily driver, using it on servers since 1991 (or 92 whenever boot.tgz/root.tgz was released), have been coding for 45 years, started several successful open source projects, wrote a full text search engine in Java in the 90s before there was Lucene, wrote the core Wiki markup engine that powered Atlassian Confluence for quite some time, because Mike asked me. That said I use a Google Pixel because - after decades of using Apple (from first iBook G3, first MacBook, first iPhone, first iPod, iPod nano, first iPad, Xserve, Xsan, iMac Pro and on and on an on) I left the Apple ecosystem when Steve died - to me Apple feels too constraining.
Not sure what that exchange was for, but I like it!
PS: Not a native speaker, don't know what "HN peanut gallery" means. But I like peanuts, though I think Peanuts are overrated. Though sometimes our dog looks like Snoopy, when her ears are flying.
So, this wasn’t a dick sizing contest about who contributes to open source. The point is there is a certain extent I will go to maintain my ideals of using certain systems and it is more than average even for here (the peanut gallery), and on par with the influencer in question, ie I can relate regardless of their “inauthentic” persona. Most people, even those that consider themselves “enthusiasts”, simply won’t go to the effort of reverse engineering or writing drivers - if it were the case there would be a much larger ecosystem of high quality drivers and a larger pool of contributors. I am in that minority and still use an iPhone, and I don’t have a subscriber count.
2. A google pixel isn’t meaningfully more open than an iPhone (I depend on functionality that would be unavailable if rooted). This wasn’t meant to be an iPhone vs android debate. For the purposes of this discussion they are equivalent.
"inauthentic" is your judgement based on your values. My post was not about judgement, just about explaining what I think happens with influencers. Your reply was based on your perception and assumptions, not on what I said it feels. Most influencers use Apple if using Graphene doesn't drive subscribers.
"reverse engineering or writing drivers"
When I encountered Linux I was already too old to be interested in that kind of things. But I did disassemble C/PM code. I was interested in blue boxing, cracking of games, infinite life reverse engineering and hacking in the 80s though.
"For the purposes of this discussion they are equivalent."
Again it feels like you made some assumptions about me and what I wanted to say which are just that, assumptions.
You literally said: “They sell something in their videos and do things in videos that are different from their true self. ”
“Inauthentic” was I still think a close enough reference paraphrase of your statement. Not a value judgement. You even used the word authentic. And in general I wouldn’t necessarily disagree but I don’t see how it is necessarily related to their choice of personal devices. An internet celeb probably doesn’t use GrapheneOS because the limitations sucks for most people, not because of some calculated subscriber count play.
Yes I did, and you called that "inauthentic" based on your value system. I'm not a native speaker but in German "inauthentic" (unauthentisch) would not be considered a neutral description.
"So, this wasn’t a dick sizing contest"
You can say "I didn't intend this a dick sizing contest" but you can't say "This wasn't a dick sizing contest". Again this is based on your judgement.
I like both Jeff and Apple products, but this does seem a pretty ... odd ... thing to say within the context of his audience. A normal person wouldn't bat an eye but the kind of people watching Jeff Geerling videos will probably have some strong opinions about it