Bambu Lab pushes a “control system” for 3D printers, and boy, did it not go well
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I'll be honest, I wouldn't be against some sort of standardized RFID system for 3D printers. Every version of every brand has it's own special behavior that can be tweaked, and when you try out a new filament, it takes some time to get it "just right". Having some system that would automatically pre-load settings for the filament you have loaded would be great. But... it would have to feed back into the slicer, because you're running your own slicer and not leaving that up to the machine/cloud, right?
That's the real problem. Any meaningful push to tag filament would really just be a push to restrict filament.
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That doesn't mean you have to give up your control over your hardware. Requiring a printer phone home to " the cloud" to print is absolutely insane. There's no reason my printer needs to touch the internet. There's no reason I should have to authenticate with the mothership just so I can send a print 10 feet across my office.
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do tell? i just checked the Prusa blog and don't see anything that seems related. what happened?
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Might be on Joseph's personal twitter/bluesky account. He's his own person, and won't post company blog updates for his own schadenfreude, despite his name being on the company.
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SubWoofer2
Ars Tribunus Militum
Enshiftification
Ah. A portmanteau or blended word to mean "enshittification by underhand or stealth means".
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Well, hypothetically, in a cloud-connected printer where the tags were indeed mandatory (which as Aurich points out, current BL models don't really have the hardware for), a bypass wouldn't necessarily be that simple. One obvious point is that the printer would know how much filament is on a spool to start with and (roughly) how much it feeds through as it prints. An evil printer could simply do a little math to dead-reckon how many meters are left on the spool (a fuel gauge for your spool would be a "feature", naturally), and then block the ID after it deems it empty.
That aside, I think the main issue you'd run into is that most filaments these days are pretty complex blends of different polymers, plasticizers, solvents, dyes, etc. A spool of "PLA" isn't just pure, virgin polylactic acid, especially not if it's PLA "+" or "Pro" or "High Speed". Every manufacturer has their own formula, and the differences can and do impact print behavior quite a bit. That's why each filament brand/color typically needs to be calibrated. That's the big selling point of using BL's own filaments: you don't have to worry about that stuff. A good factory-tuned filament profile just gets loaded in from the tag.
But...If they took the step of locking those factory profiles down completely, not letting you tweak them or make your own, then you'd be stuck with whatever settings are attached to the RFID tag you borrow. The chance that those are the settings you really need is just about zero. You might be able to get away with it anyway, particularly if you don't care about quality -- bad settings probably won't fail completely if they're for roughly the same type of filament -- but the results won't be nearly as reliable or as pretty.
(If a company were really evil, they could maybe even deliberately tune their formulas to be a little extra "weird" compared to other brands, or vary them from batch to batch, to make clones or coincidental matches less likely.)
Yeah, as a concrete prediction, I think people are getting ahead of themselves with that: there are multiple paths to enshittification, and we don't really know which way Bambu is trying to go here yet. My own guess would be some kind of cloud service subscription thing rather than an HP/Keurig/Juicero-style supply lockdown. But who knows. Looking 12 moves ahead just isn't really possible yet.
Still, I think the instinct to look far ahead and prepare for the worst possibilities is a good one here. While we may not know exactly what the board looks like 12 moves ahead, we do all know how the game is played by now. There's a vanishingly small chance that this was their last move, after all. While the next move may take months (gotta wait for the furor to die down), it is almost certainly coming. And then it'll just be three squares forward, one square back until they take the whole board. Mustering early collective outrage and taking drastic preemptive action right now is critical. For consumers, the only winning move in this particular game is not to play.
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There's an old blog post you can read here:
https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-printing-in-2023_76659/
and an interview with Adafruit here:
https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/07/1...nging-face-of-open-source-hardware-companies/
A follow-up has been promised but nothing yet. Prusa has outright said that printers for desktop usage will always have an open source firmware+slicer and will be open to third parties, period. Their bootloader is closed source but they've said it's simply a bootloader and has no other functions. There are not full circuit schematics for the MK4/XL/Core One or some CAD components for the Nextruder released yet. I'll hear him out but if the firmware ever goes closed source I'm out.
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I'm fine with the outrage. Let them know we don't like it. I don't like it.
But I'm just bored with the level of escalation. Nothing they've done is indicating filament lockdown. Or a subscription for that matter.
And those moves just don't make sense. The company isn't stupid. I've watched interviews with their CEO, he's a sharp guy. They're popular because they make good hardware that works, I simply don't buy the narrative that they're trying to flush it all away.
I do think they want control though, and before this it was a "put up with level" and it can certainly go too far.
I've been following this whole thing, off of Ars, here in our forum, talking to people in Discord, reading comments on Hackaday, watching videos, and what I've noticed is the people who are the most mad are the ones who don't own Bambu hardware (and tend to tell you they would never buy it). And the people who are the most sanguine and "let's see what happens" are the ones who do own it, and will actually be affected by changes.
That's why it feels like FUD.
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Not too many people mentioning it, but you could check out Qidi.
I had some terrible experiences with couple different printers years ago, but got back into it with a deeply discounted Q1 Pro last summer and haven't looked back. I'm sure they're not quite as plug and play as BL printers, but I've gone through 15kg or 20kg of plastic now without having to do that much more than push the start button. Bonus that it runs pretty much stock Klipper firmware, barely even skinned. And their support is reportedly excellent.
Only real downside I see is no (stock) AMS. There's one in the works, but only for the new top of the line model. I may attempt to bolt on an ERCF or something to the Q1 someday, but it'd be a bit of a project.
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Only came here to say I thought that was fantastic writing...or I'm just used to AI slop now and this is the first human article I read all day
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Louis is a champ. Some of his choices are a little odd like choosing to move to and pay taxes in company loving, 0%(?) corp tax Texas while being entirely anti company, but what he does on the right to repair stuff and trying to hold companies accountable for their bs is ace.
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Maybe. On the other hand, if that is representative of the attitude from their customers, it might be exactly why they feel like they can get away with it.
As you say, Bambu is very savvy, and has done a really good recognizing the huge market out there for a hobby level printer that "just works", one that enables hobbies, rather than being the hobby. It's probably a good assumption that they'll be just as savvy about extracting exactly as much rent from that market as it will bear.
If that's the case, I don't think it's crazy to take this move as a sign that they think that level is a bit higher than they're getting now, and are taking steps accordingly.
I also don't think it'd be crazy for the people most squarely in that market to eventually shrug, and cough up the extra $20/mo subscription or whatever this ends up as, because that's still the best deal they've got.
But that's the problem. Enshittification (usually) works.
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He owns and runs a company that does electronics repairs. He is very pro-right-to-repair, as that is central to his business, but it makes sense for him to move somewhere that as you claim is pro-business.
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We have a P1S with AMS unit.
Currently sitting on a little over 2k hours of print time.
Beyond a few small issues with filament poop hate blocks, it’s been insanely good.
We come from a PRUSA printer that spent more time being fettled.
We mostly use BL filaments as it simplifies things, but we have rolls of ESun that work great too.
Feels like a storm in a teacup to me though. It’s not a tinkerers devices, it’s a device that simply works and produces high quality prints every time.
Currently sitting on a little over 2k hours of print time.
Beyond a few small issues with filament poop hate blocks, it’s been insanely good.
We come from a PRUSA printer that spent more time being fettled.
We mostly use BL filaments as it simplifies things, but we have rolls of ESun that work great too.
Feels like a storm in a teacup to me though. It’s not a tinkerers devices, it’s a device that simply works and produces high quality prints every time.
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It might have been said, but the Creality Ender-3 v3 SE has required zero tinkering on my part. I haven't used it a ton yet, but I don't think it can get more plug and play friendly. First run the auto-leveling program. Design stuff in Tinkercad, open and export in Creality Print, plop it onto a SD card and shove it up the machine and hit print. And it's cheap! I too have zero interest in tinkering and tweaking or 3D printing as a hobby, and so far I think it's done alright.
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Recurring revenue is what all companies want, but they already have it. People who buy their printers end up buying lots of their filament, especially small businesses. Frankly, I'm surprised that people are treating this like a US company cash grab when it seems much more likely to be a Chinese company information grab.
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Yea , I’ve had Prusas, my main problem with them is that they sat on their laurels and the XL was a delay after delay disaster that eroded trust in the brand they had built up for quality products .. especially when the first year or so of units turned out a mess. Also , that all in price is just not competitive these days.
I’m sure it’s good now , and its still really the only commercially available integrated tool changer in that area.. but for the money it’s hard not to argue buying one or several Bambu units isn’t more efficient for most purposes, depending on your needs.
The H2D bambu better be absolutely mind blowing if Bambu wants to keep their lead . They are quickly getting caught up to or surpassed by Prusa and even Creality (K2+) nipping at their heels.
They didn’t need this distraction, and they absolutely made their own lives harder for no discernible gain .
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Agreed. At work, we use Ultimakers with multi material stations for printing parts for experiments, and if you use Ultimaker's own filament you'll get stuff like type and color loaded automatically from RFID tags, so it's annoying when using third party filaments to have to manually select it - it just working across manufacturers would be nice.
With how it works with the slicer, we just use Ultimaker CURA, so it's integrated through that and a network connection to the printer.
I also find the security claims... interesting. Where I work, there's reasonable info-sec concerns that shape things (all computers have to run a standard build of Windows/macOS/Linux, nothing goes on the cloud, etc). Despite that, the printers are allowed on the network and just work - no cloud connection, nothing like that.
And if Ultimaker can make it work well enough (it's damn near just plug them in, do some basic setup, and start printing) and secure enough without cloud connected nonsense, than Bambu can too.
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I don't know about trying to lock down what filament people use or such, but the products being good or not has nothing to do with whether a company goes for a lockdown or not. There are a lot of examples by now in basically all technological fields where a company got greedy and decided to try and implement a full lockdown even with mediocre products -- the two are simply completely separate concepts, the latter is driven by shareholder demand and/or CEO's attempts at keeping revenue growth increasing forever and not product quality or popularity.Suggestions that they're going to lock down their printers to only use their filament etc are just FUD or conspiracy theories. They make good printers, but not that good.
I don't know if Bambu Labs is going to do any of this or not or how they'd approach it, but I don't see any good reason why they wouldn't attempt it at some point.
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You can get a cheap Chinese printer like an Ender 3 and upgrade the shit out of it. Don’t expect good results out of the box but it is easy to upgrade. I got a direct drive extruder, auto leveling, new springs, new mainboard (with new firmware), octoprint server, and new bed.
Those upgrades cost, but not nearly as much as a ready-made printer that does the same and you will never ever have to deal with OEM bullshit or vendor lock in.
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I don’t want something that can start a fire connected to the internet. Nope. You should never print unsupervised anyway. The whole feature is just stupid and destined to get somebody killed eventually.
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The whole Chinese corporation being allowed to scrape my data is my second worry.
As others have beaten; the filament is a non issue for me.
Edit; i clarified one thing, and now the top 2/3 of my post is now a quote? And I can't edit it out. Meh.
(My inability here is part of why I was interested in a Bambu, lol
)
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PLA autoignition temperature is nearly 400C, and ABS nearly 500C. The only way it's going to catch fire is if you could somehow burn out the windings on one of the stepper motors, and then you have to hope there's enough flammable in that motor for it to spread.
It's not like these are paper printers with large volumes of paper and ink nearby.
You're going to stay up and monitor an entire multi-day print?
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
I wouldn't say most people seem to be criticizing Bambu for doing something they aren't. What people are doing doing is looking at how Bambu has behaved so far, noting they seem to be making moves that could easily combine quite suddenly to significantly alter the nature of what Bambu is selling, and looking at all the other businesses in recent years which have done exactly that.
If you want to give companies like Bambu the benefit of the doubt, the only real answer is good consumer protection laws combined with a government willing to back them up. Since we have neither, caution is well warranted, and I'd personally stay away from Bambu for at least another couple years to make sure they're not doing anything else that signals the kind of changes people are worried about.
I know you probably weren't looking for a political angle on 3D printers, but nevertheless here it is.
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You left out the OPs disinterest in tinkering and tweaking, hence the V3 SE recommendation. No need to upgrade anything either, it prints just fine out of the box, and has auto leveling so it's zero fiddling and it's <$200. And no offence, but comments like yours is what for a very long time killed all my interest in 3D printing. I still don't think 3D printing is quite ready for the true masses, but the V3 SE is getting there. No messing about or reading several days worth of nonsensical jargon on reddit and it's cheap enough that if you have a few things ready to try to print it's worth a go. I don't even know what a drive extruder is and I intend to never find out, because I'm just not intersted. I just have stuff I want to print. I don't want to read up on stuff, or engage with a goddamned community or anything.
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Nah. They fucked up and people are letting them know.
But this constant refrain of enshittification like it's a mantra, the bullshit about LOCKED DOWN FILAMENT IS NEXT etc? That's all coming from the FOSS crowd. And I'm sorry, I want to support the idea of open source, but when you're so constantly extra about it all I honestly don't want anything to do with it. Chill out.
What are you basing this on though?
Like ... what is it you know that makes you say that?
Again, where is this $20 a month idea coming from? For what? What are you talking about exactly?
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The Bambu have a LAN only mode. I set mine up with the cloud app (phone app I suppose), it's been LAN ever since, except when I see there is a firmware update. I think the controversial update adds more authentication to the LAN only mode as well.
+1 Vote for industry standard RFID and spools/refills.
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Pretty much nobody but Bambu has a good AMS system. It's a super half assed ecosystem right now. That will change eventually.
If the Prusa XL was a better printer it would be super interesting, but everyone who owns one seems to be really down on it.
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The OrcaSlicer devs released info before this blew up saying that BambuLab contacted them about the upcoming changes, and when the OrcaSlicer devs asked to be given authorization so that they could continue to be used without the restricted functionality available in Bambu Connect, they were told that BambuLab would not support direct slicing from 3rd party slicers anymore (sorry for the Xitter link).
This developer LAN mode wasn't listed in the initial blog post. People were left to take BL at face value when the post said LAN users would need an access key through Bambu Connect as well, tying local printing to BambuLab's cloud infrastructure.
This option to not upgrade to the new firmware wasn't listed in the initial blog post. People were forced to take BL at face value when BL's Terms of Service said that future firmware updates could block printers from printing until installed.
You misunderstood the anger, since this wasn't about closed source vs open source (as you pointed out, every BL enthusiast knew it was closed source), but about BL saying they would "create an ecosystem for 3rd party developers" and then deciding to alter the deal.
Except that Apple never endorsed jailbreaking, while BambuLab endorsed 3rd party devices interfacing with their printers.
Prusa has long given highly detailed guides to repair and replace components in their printers, arguably giving the shoulders for BambuLab to stand on.
BambuLab's AMS system is very good at multicolour printing, and acceptably good at multimaterial printing for those who can't spare the expense of a tool changer or independent dual extruder system. It is at the cost of being far and away the most wasteful multicolour system on the market, but for people concerned with reliability above all else, it's the best choice for those who don't need the 16 colours of Creality's CFS.
I don't much sympathy for a company that mischaracterizes criticism, edits their previous posts without notice, and then removes previous versions of their posts from the major archive service all in the service of trying to tighten their control over printers beyond what they previously advertised. If they had taken this position from the start, perhaps they wouldn't have been quite so successful.
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They already have that info if that's the play. Like, they've had it for years, the cloud thing has been there from the start. There's no grab.
You either use it or don't, but anyone with a Bambu has come to terms with it already.
Did they really though? I don't think that's accurate. They provided a pathway for people who wanted to their own firmware and be on their own, which is I think fine. But the Panda Touch was never endorsed. The opposite. They warned them it was based on a crack that they weren't leaving in place.
Which you can be not down with, but I don't think endorsement every happened.
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I agree. I’ve owned more than my share of 3D printers over the years, and the Bambi is the first one to just be an appliance that just prints with none of the hassle.
In this debate I wonder a bit that we seem to foist the idea that 3D printing companies must be entirely open and hacker friendly. If you change your private APIs and break a third party, you’re now the enemy of the community.
I get that people fear the business model will change. I think the idea that suddenly your printer will be a brick if you don’t pay a subscription is a bit “out there” to say the least. But I suppose anything is possible.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Bambu to ensure hacked up third party add-ons work forever, but for those who bought the third party items without realizing the third party was relying on reverse engineered integrations, its Bambu that will take the blame for changing their internal protocols.
For the rest of us who just want something that works without endlessly tweaking and fixing, and haven’t paid attention to third party add ons, this all just seems like a tempest in a teapot. The thing continues to print like it always has.
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Love it when hardware companies move into the subscription service. #Cricut
Certainly will be sustainable.
Certainly will be sustainable.
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You can buy "ready-made" printers from Creality. Get anything from the K-family and you can pull it out of the box, slap it on your workbench, hit the "calibrate" button while you unload your filament, and start out-printing your Ender 3 without doing anything.
The Ender 3 was the go-to "cheap but you'll work for it" printer forever. But it's long in the tooth. If someone wants an X1 but they don't want Bambu, do not recommend them a fucking Ender 3 plus replacement parts for every functional part of the printer.
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I don't have to expose my Brother laser printer to the internet, authenticate with Brother's servers, and send all my print jobs through Brother. Why does it make sense for my 3D printer to require that?
I don't want anything that doesn't need to touch the internet to artificially rely on some remote server. That goes double for something capable of getting hot enough to burn my house down if someone else gains access. Requiring such behavior under the guise of "security" is an insult. Don't bullshit me. It's fundamentally less secure. My printers sit on a subnet with 0 access to the internet. Requiring me to poke through my firewall is objectively less secure.
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I mostly agree with you that people are running well ahead of what the situation is, with talk of subscription fees, locking down print farms, whatever. We don't actually know what Bambu intends at this point, and people are getting a bit wild with the speculation then running ahead as if that speculation is fact. I think at the core of this is a lack of trust though, and that's understandable when Bambu is acting like this.
However, I disagree more with this quoted block as it doesn't reflect my personal experience with where the controversy is coming from. I've got an X1c and know half a dozen others, all of whom are livid about this. The situation dragged Jeff Geerling out to make a video about the matter, mostly focused on the lack of trust, and did so on his second channel so I'm not buying any argument that it was just chasing controversy for clout. He's not the only one that has done so. The bambu subreddit was also on fire for several days after the first news of this dropped.
Personally I've locked my X1C into LAN mode and blocked its access to the internet at the router level because of this, despite it being considerably less convenient to use that way.
It's fair to be skeptical of peoples motives, particularly on a topic like this where there's a large number of 3D printer enthusiasts that loathe Bambu. But I don't think this is a situation where it's mainly non-owners stirring the pot, which is how I'm taking what you said above.
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This is why I get frustrated.
This person, who has no clue what's going on, sees people talking about subscriptions that don't exist and joins the misinformation club.
Cricut backed off due to the protest, and rightly so. It's not about shutting people up. But you should speak up about real things, not made up ones. Companies don't pay attention to voices that are spreading nonsense, they're just not credible.
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Big agree, the Ender 3 as a go to is way long past making any sense.
I'd have to look at the market more closely, I haven't been following every development since I'm happy with my current setup of X1C, backup Prusa Mk3, and GKTWO. But Qidi would be on my list probably. I would want to know about the Creality K2 Plus if I was looking at the company.
Really it's about people's budgets and needs though. Bambu was easy because they were all good printers and they had something for every price range.
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