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.
> 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.
That would depend how much "safety" is built into the control system.
The simplest solution I've seen is taping up the edges of the enclosure where you find gaps, to prevent heat escaping.
If it's only PID-ing the bed, the ambient temperature shouldn't matter. Less work to do for the bed heater. On the nozzle, it's similar. A 40 C increase in ambient temperature isn't much compared to the 150 C+ that the control system is maintaining. Since the active parts of the printer must be capable of running at the target chamber temperature, there should be no risk unless you exceed it. The question is really, is the printer designed to operate continuously with a chamber of X C?
However... the risk would be that if it's too well insulated there isn't a good way for the system to cool quickly if it needs to, or if it somehow messes with what the control system is tuned for. On the older printers you could re-calibrate the PID loops to your specific hardware and environment. The newer 32-bit firmware seems to not require user tuning at all. Similarly with full enclosures, you might worry about the power supply or other electronics which aren't meant to be run at high ambient (maybe fine though).
You could also look at a separate solution like enclosing the printer in well-insulated chamber, and aiming to keep that outer space above ambient. That would be a good option if you're expecting a big thermal gradient to your workspace, like an unheated garage in winter.
But lots of questions really. Do you want to run at a high chamber temp? Are you running in a cold environment and having problems? Trying to save power? These are different scenarios.
Yep - indeed one important issue people often forget with enclosures is that any non trivial components that end up inside the heated enclosure need to be able to safely continue working at the increased air temperature inside + any heat they or other parts of the printer generate that affects them.
If you steppers are already hot at 22 degrees of room temperature, they might end up damaged if air is at 45 degrees + are in use and generate their own heat.
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.
I am still a bit iffy about the whole sending out fleets of 100s of printers to influencers during the pandemic while also increasing the price for their entry lineup.
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.
Josef clearly cares about being as open as possible, but has bumped up against the fact that companies like Bambu can just take their designs and extend them with things they don't share, and sell a product with more features and a lower price.
Unfortunately, it seems like the fully open source business model doesn't work well when you can be undercut by extremely cheap labor from another country and a company that doesn't share or reciprocate your values.
Share what? Nothing what Bambu is doing is remotely secret. There are no mystery sauce to figure out. Prusa genuinely got outflanked by Bambu when it comes to designing a printer.
They forked the slicer, and then put the networking part in a plugin that gets downloaded after you open it purely so they don't have to share the source for it as the rest of the slicer is GPL.
I still remember running Red Hat Linux when it was free and open source, before Red Hat Enterprise Linux, before Fedora, before CentOS, before RockyOS...
It's tough to build a business around a product that takes a lot of capital to build, and you offer for free to your competitors...
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.
Can you explain how releasing model files under a restrictive license vs not releasing model is a net restriction of the freedoms of end users and small businesses? The impression I'm getting is that if they locked away those files and never released them, you would have nothing to complain about.
This is like complaining about Valve letting game developers generate free Steam keys (=Valve doesn't get fees) that can be sold on other storefronts with the caveat that the developer must sell the keys for at least the same price he set on steam. Being allowed to sell those keys is a sign of goodwill, but the goodwill is conditional upon the source of goodwill not destroying itself. If you buy a game on the Humble Store, Valve won't get a single cent, most of the money goes to the developer, and yet Valve still has all of the ongoing infrastructure costs.
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.
Even if the unscrupulous entities cared about the license, they would just get their (already paid for) CAD person to reverse engineer every single necessary model over the course of a week. If an amateur like me can reliably do that in his spare time, imagine what a professional could do during an 8 hour shift.
But it doesn't matter either way because no unscrupulous entity is going to be dumb enough to publicly announce that they used the models to produce their clone.
If I manufacture a clone of a Prusa, there is no way for anyone to prove that I used the original 3D models. If it were possible to prove that, it would also be possible to "prove" that I copied 3D CAD models that I've never seen, which could put me in legal trouble. Reverse engineering is not a crime, and reverse engineering (and all the costs associated with manufacturing and prototyping[0]) likely _can_ reproduce a near identical Prusa printer.
As an aside, if you've seen the average Prusa clone, it's often quite far from the original design. Almost nobody 1:1 cloned Prusas back when that was a thing, because the Prusa design didn't cut corners. Those clones would often use designs which were probably derived from the original, and were unpublished. Why didn't Prusa go after them for this? He should have had just as much luck given that those manufacturers were potentially in breach of the GPL.
In summary, the OCL cannot actually stop clones, because if it did, we'd have some serious problems with our legal systems, prohibiting perfectly legal reverse engineering (irrespective of if the cloners did the reverse engineering or not).
It _only_ stops people who are honest enough to state that their designs are derived from Prusa's models. People who weren't a threat to begin with, and who now are voluntarily subscribing to legal issues if they ever felt like selling a Prusa modification without Prusa's approval.
The real deterrents are:
* Design complexity
* Extreme amounts of competition (almost nobody would buy a prusa clone these days unless they _wanted_ to have an almost broken printer to force them to learn how to make it work reliably). We have cheap, good, first party 3D printer designs.
[0]: To clarify, when I say prototyping, this needs to happen irrespective of if you reverse engineer or not. Once you have the models, which will be true to life, you still have to "reverse engineer" the tools/dies/materials/etc, for which Prusa sensibly does _not_ offer the models.
So you want European companies to keep being nice and "open", do all the research and invent new technologies and products for the chinese to copy and sell cheap clones of!
Basically every "AWS ate open core company lunch thread" is filled with people arguing that releasing your products under an open source license is immoral because the company didn't foresee that a hosting provider is going to swallow them in 8 years to the point where the project would have to be abandoned. However, the immorality doesn't lie in the death of the project, no. The immorality lies in the continued existence of the project under a slightly more restrictive license.
It's always a headscratcher when you try to eeke out a living and are told that you have to work for a company writing proprietary software to have the right to work on an open source project. Wouldn't it be better if you made your living off the open source project? Apparently not. If the project was proprietary from the start, there would be no complaints.
This hardliner stance basically means there is no continuum between proprietary software and open source software. That lack of continuum will mean that the vast majority of software will always be 100% proprietary.
Voron isn't a company, nor are they after a profit, all designs are 100% opensource. Sovol runs on a profit and uses opensource designs to run their products.
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.
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.
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.
If you decide to get a Bambu anyway, let me heartily recommend against an H2D.
It did "just work" for a while, but then the print cooling fan went bad. On my home Voron, this would be a 5 minute fix. On the H2D, it is this [0]. You basically have to take the entire toolhead apart, removing the mainboard inside it with no less than 11 very tiny and fragile custom ribbon cables that connect to it, plus 5 more connections on a second board that goes on top of it. Most minor fixes are like this. Another time, I had to remove a stuck piece of filament, which involved taking apart the whole front of the toolhead and dealing with even smaller and more fragile flex PCBs.
This is like complaining that on your dirt track racer it's a trivial process to swap the rear end spur and change final drive ratios. Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.
Maybe they should care a little, because the long-term repairability of their BMW or Bambu is going to put a real dent in their resale value. But they're not the ones dealing with tweezers and ZIF connectors and flex PCBs, so it's mostly just not their problem.
3D printers used to be exclusively the domain of people who enjoyed doing all this work themselves, who loved a well-designed machine that was a joy to work with like a Voron. That's no longer the case, Bambu is offering unrepairable black boxes that "just work" for enough time that some people can afford not to think care how it's made.
>Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.
We wouldn't really care either, but alas, there is no 3D printer dealership service center (unless you count 1 month round trip to ship it back).
I'd argue that my workplace who bought the H2D is exactly Bambu's target market. Most of us have personal printers we tinker with, but for work projects we need something that is mostly hit print and wait. We aren't really running a print farm, but we do a lot of iterations and make prototypes constantly. This is what the H2D was purchased for (specifically, the heated enclosure to better print ASA parts). Being hard to repair isn't really a problem, it's that it broke at all. And after it does break, changing a fan or clearing a jam should not be overhaul grade maintenance.
We also have a couple of P1Ss that are very solid, the one H2D has all the problems.
Sounds like RC quadcopters society -- everyone knows DJI, but they make fan guards a part of the frame. Guards and props are the most fragile parts, a consumable really. Something an enthusiast often carry spares for, to quickly swap on the field for any other RC quad, but with DJI you need what, send the whole frame to factory?
I like my H2D, but it definitely hit a brick wall. I replaced it, and had the same issue with one of the nozzles not printing consistently.
This was after around 700 hours, which isn’t terrible, but working with their support is exhausting. I don’t think I’m going to touch it again until winter, unfortunately.
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 got the V2 and same - no fuss, especially if I stick to Elegoo filament. Multicolour worked out of the box, to the point where it's difficult to think it was a Big Thing until recently.
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)?
Given how I'm not sure there are 2D printers that really "just work" and don't throw opaque hard to track down errors at random - I actually like open 3D printers that do break, but you can be sure any issue is fixable & you will learn something new in the process. :)
I know it's popular to shit on 2D printers, but other than very often being very slow and running out of ink (or rubber rollers hardening after 20 years of use) - I actually didn't have any issues with them? But then I actually didn't really use them for 20 years either.
* one day remote printing no longer works, you need to set it up again or even get into prolonged debugging session
* remote printing works one ane device but not other
* one color toner cartridge on a color laser printer is empty or near empty, printer refuses to print without all manners of overrides on the local control panel, making it unusable for non-technical users
Well, the last point is basically sabotage by the manufacturer to make you buy more stuff, as it can print B/W perfectly fine or with slighly less quality until that one cartridge is replaced. But I guess that kinda proves my original point. :)
I stopped buying cartridge-based inkjets years ago. I'm happy with my Canon G3020, which uses ink tanks (built into the printer, not a third-party addon that the manufacturer will claim voids the warranty).
And it's impressive how long those ink tanks last: I printed out 400 pages of full color and the ink tanks went from 80% full to about 50% full. (There's a clear plastic window in front of the ink tanks, with a "refill when ink reaches this level" line on it — a raised line of plastic, not something inked or painted onto it that could rub off — so you can glance at the printer and see what level the ink is at). The ink bottles cost me about $12 each if I remember right, and each one will fill the ink tank from the "refill here" line to more than 100%: I had to stop filling, then wait until I had printed a few hundred more pages, then refill the rest. Rough back-of-the-envelope math says maybe 1200 pages from a full ink tank. The C, M, and Y bottles will cost $36 total (the K bottle will last a lot longer so I'm not counting it in this math), which means 3 cents a page for full-color, ink covering nearly the whole page, prints. Considering the cheapest print shop I've found would charge me 20 cents per page (and I've seen 50-cents-a-page quotes for full-color printing), the $200 printer will have already paid for itself by the time you run through one ink tank (17 cents saved times 1200 pages is $204).
This is turning into an ad for Canon, but seriously, it's a great printer. The only thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't do automatic duplex printing (I have to pull the pages out, flip them over, and put them back in), and I knew that when I bought it (the model that did automatic duplex was $450, and I chose not to buy that one). Oh, and I am not affiliated with Canon in any way: considering how glowing a review this is, I should probably say that explicitly.
But the best part for me was that it's not an Epson. I previously owned an Epson ink tank printer, and it was great... until the ink sponge filled up. Did you know that ink jet printers, at least the ink-tank variety, have a sponge inside them? When you do a "clean clogged print heads" routine, the printer moves the print head over to the position of the sponge, and pushes ink through the print heads until it's moved enough liquid to hopefully push the clog out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But the sponge can only absorb so much ink before it fills up. And on an Epson, the sponge is not a user-serviceable part. They want you to send it to one of their official repair shops to get it replaced, costing I don't know how much because I refused to do it. I found an unofficial way to wipe the printer's internal counter that kept track of how much ink was in the sponge... and when the printer died about a year later (for unrelated reasons), I went shopping for another brand. I'll never buy an Epson printer again. Canon, on the other hand, will sell you a "maintenance cartridge" (a large sponge mounted in a plastic tray of the right shape to slot into the printer) for about $10 plus shipping. When the sponge gets full you can just swap in a new one. Dead simple.
Enough gushing from me. The point that I spent way too long getting to is, ink-jet printers don't have to use cartridges. Ink-tank printers used to only be available in the Asia/Pacific market, but they're available in the US now. A couple years ago I helped my parents (in the US) buy a Canon G3020 and set it up for them. So far their experience has been positive, too.
Isn't this just a Bambu marketing point? I have a Prusa MK4S and a Centauri Carbon - they both print without any fuss and can be operated without any deep technical understanding.
Im not sure what problems people are even envisioning having. I got a diy Anet8 that was badly assembled by somebody else years ago that they gave to me for free. I tightened up some fittings and strapped down some loose wires and it still just works. If newer and supposedly better printers were more difficult I would consider them junk, in operation they aren't that complicated of machines. The most complicated thing I gotta do is usually change the print temp up or down 5 degrees for different company filaments.
Last time I checked you don’t have to pay that much more for a Prusa than a similar spec Bambu printer.
And in any case, Bambu’s well-publicized abuse of open source has driven me off of ever using their printers. I know that only nerds care about this, so I hope Prusa keeps pushing to build a straightforwardly better product.
Ender 3 V2 that I paid <$250 for about 5 years ago. It paid for itself on the first print job where I repaired some Samsung stove knobs where replacements were $400 a set.
I'm now considering an upgrade and I'll likely just go with the Ender 3 V3 Plus (bigger bed, auto leveling, still an offline printer) and < $450 for cost.
It's been a fantastic printer for me.
I use Cura, stick with standard settings, use Sun PLA+ for all my prints, and the only thing I really need to do is level the bed sometimes.
I upgraded from the 3 to the 5, and had some great experiences with it. My Ender 3 was such a Printer of Theseus; I think I'd replaced everything except the extruded aluminium frame by the time I upgraded.
But that's part of the hobby, surely? Like, just having a printer and having it print things first time, and never taking it apart or replacing chunks of it to see if that would work better, seems kinda dull to me ;)
Creality has printers that are straight-up clones of the Bambu printers and are just as easy to use, but they've historically been somewhat okay at working in the open source ecosystem, unlike Bambu.
Prusa is, of course, the gold standard, and their more recent printers are super easy to use, too.
are they making their own actuators that communicate with some encryption?
if i buy a bamboo and i dont like it, can i not just cut out all the electroincs and put whatever the new dev board of the day is and flash standard 3d printing firmware on it and send it through a calibration run?
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.
The "middle ground" is fairly split amongst different manufacturers like Creality, Anycubic, Elegoo, and even Anker now so it's hard for a popular one to emerge.
Having experienced both Prusa's prices (not just the machines, but also parts like nozzles and thermistors -- there's no way Prusa's thermistors should be twice as expensive as Bambu's) and Bambu's shenanigans, if I ever need a new printer, I'm very inclined to start my search with those smaller brands too.
If you can afford to pay more for less printer, get a Prusa Core One. I almost did, but at the time the cost would have included four months of waiting, and that was just too much.
But the Qidi Plus 4 has been just a beast for me. It had some growing pains, and the Internet is forever, so if you read up on it you'll see some scary-looking problems involving the heating element which have been completely fixed for more than a year. From everything I've been able to determine, the QC issues with the Plus 4 are over, and the newer printers like the Q2 and Max 4 have never had them.
I think the intersection of "reads HN" and "needs that tiny delta of convenience between Bambu and Qidi" is empty, basically. Qidi are good open source citizens, and you get a lot of bang for your buck, especially handling high-temp filaments. It's _possible_ to print nylon and ABS on Bambu hardware, but realistically you want something a little better.
Also they're cheaper than Bambu. Thought that was worth mentioning as well.
I'd seriously consider the Snapmaker U1 also, but not the K2 Plus. For one thing, Creality has had to be bullied several times to meet GPL obligations, and I don't like to reward that kind of behavior. For another, the Qidi Max4 is bigger, prints hotter, is more precise, and costs less. Pareto improvement on the K2 Plus.
I'm holding out on the Snapmaker because a) my Qidi Plus 4 is a great piece of hardware and at only 700 hours it's got a lot of life left in it, and b) The Prusa + Bondtech INDX is right around the corner. That's probably going to be my next printer. I find the waste and extreme slowness of AMS-style multimaterial too distasteful to invest in, and I think that entire paradigm will end up in the dustbin as tool-changing consumer FDM matures.
I'm mostly happy with my Qidi Plus 4. It's pretty much plug and play. They are sometimes a bit rough around the edges, but mostly good. I'd say don't buy the newest model at launch because they tend to beta test at the customer.
I’ve gotten some really good prints with a Qidi Q1 Pro. Have read good reviews about some of the other/newer versions by the same brand as well. They are very cheap for the features they have, and excellent quality
The first year was rough, from what I've read. Mine arrived March 2025, it has taken no work to print excellently, and at about 700 hours I have lubricated it every 200 hours, and I just tightened the belts about 50 hours ago. That's it. If it's less than $100 a roll I've probably printed it. I have no complaints.
From what I've gathered across Discord servers (QIDI official, QIDI unifficial and Team 7 mostly), there is a decent percentage of machines that more or less just work, as has been your experience. For the less lucky ones, it's a lifetime of tinkering. I'm on the latter cohort, unfortunately.
Not to mention that out of the box you need to lock the printer in a cabinet as its printing. It used to give me headaches to be close to it for more than a couple minutes.
Chinese printers, like Chinese drones, Chinese PV equipment, and Chinese electric cars are inexpensive but that's because the Chinese Communist Party loves to pick winners.
They subsidise the living heck out of designated national champions, dump oceans of cheap product onto the international market, kill off international competitors, and then seize control of markets. It is neither legal, nor morally defensible.
Want a printer that happens to not be made in China? Good luck. Pay more, or knuckle under, and accept Chinese control of your technology, and increasingly, what you are allowed to say and think.
I don't think Prusa and Bambu compare well. Prusa printers aren't as cleanly designed as Bambu and they are more than twice the price. I consider them really poor value for money. And Bambu printers aren't clones. The AMS is something they came up with.
Also, Prusa copy from Bambu too. Like their own material switcher (much less sophisticated than the AMS) and the new Core printer is really more a Bambu copy than the other way around, honestly. In fact other brands are copying Bambu too.
I really like them, they are fair to me as a consumer. Spare parts are cheap, there's no consumable restrictions or subscriptions for their cloud service.
And they're really as plug and play as you can get right now. I don't really need that, I've owned printers since the first generation so I know how to deal with issues. But really they happen rarely. The worst I get is stuck filament in the AMS and I found I can prevent that by removing the bit of filament with gear bite marks after it's been through. It absorbs more water then and gets brittle.
Also I've learned from earlier printers not to mix materials in the same nozzle so I switch them too.
Core XY didn't exist in consumer printers outside of Vorons that took hours to build. If all a new company did was take an obvious concept and make it accessible, then that just reflects poorly on the previous market leaders.
I have about 15,000 hours on my Bambu x1c, and it's been fantastic. Their customer service has been great, too; the couple of times that I've had service issues, the tech genuinely worked with me to solve the problem. They were a lot nicer about it than the times I had to contact prusa about my older i3. FWIW.
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.
>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.
This is how you end up with overpriced "3D print cartridges", unfixable printers that fail at warranty + 1 day and control software that goes "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't print that."
> As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me
Are they actually still the best on price/performance? There are now dozens of Bambu clones at lower prices, I'm wondering how much worse those are (for example, a printer like the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2)?
Lower prices? I'm seeing the Carbon 2 priced 12% more than a P1S and 60% more than an A1. The base A1 goes for like 270€. I'm not sure if that's possible to undercut without losses if you sum up just the price of the hardware.
I just finished building a Core One+. It has a number of printed parts, but it also does have a bunch of injection molded ones, and they've just replaced another printed one with injection molding. Most of it is metal though, with the printed parts mostly used as relatively simple brackets to hold stuff in place that doesn't need great precision, and replacing those probably wouldn't save much on cost. I think these days they do the printed parts thing mostly to dogfood their print farm solution and I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation had only one or two printed parts for bragging rights. I wasn't a big fan of that either, the Mini I got in 2000 had a few critical parts printed and that did impact performance somewhat, but the Core One+ is fine in that regard.
From a hobbyist perspective, I find it's a much better designed machine than a friend's Bambu that recently broke down and turned out pretty much unfixable. Performance is at least on par, but the entire Prusa can be taken apart with basic hex and torx keys, it's highly serviceable and repairable, lots of fairly standard parts, not very highly integrated. I consider that a feature, but that will cause higher sourcing and assembly costs. It's built like a tank, lots of attention to detail, I expect it to last for a long time with minimal servicing.
That also means it's not targeting the same niche as Bambu's printers. That's not a personal insult, that's just a consequence of how things are right now. No European company is going to undercut a ultra high scale Chinese market dominiation vehicle, that's just not happening. Prusa is doing lots of R&D on much lower sales, they don't have the kind of access to Chinese industry that Bambu has, obviously the Bambu will be cheaper even if Prusa tried to compete in the same segment. But once the market domination thing is far enough along I expect Bambu will disallow non-chipped filament, lock everything into their cloud and jack up their prices. That's how these schemes usually end if they work out, but if they did that now, companies like Prusa would see record sales, so they don't do that just yet.
I'm pretty happy we still have some trace amounts of viable B2C tech industry in Europe. Companies like Prusa provide insane social value too by keeping skills and production in the EU. That's something we sorely need more of (not that companies are to blame, but we still do). Not sure how things will play out, and I'm not too optimistic, but perhaps with everyone else going all-in on dark patterns and pumping out disposable low cost crap, there is an emerging niche for reasonably open high-quality products that serve the owner first and don't data mine them for every last private detail.
Sure I'm certain that is the endgame for Bambu, but I'm also sure that people won't stand for it as long as there's any kind of competition (of which there's currently loads) and will move to the next best thing. They've come out of nowhere and captured the current gen, for the next one we'll probably see someone new.
I don't really buy the longevity angle for something that's moving so fast in terms of tech, my old Ender 3 lasted long enough to make itself obsolete in practically all aspects with practically zero maintenance. I had to junk a perfectly working machine because it became something not worth putting filament into. With such improvements each gen I'd rather have a cheaper machine that runs for a few years. Maybe we've already peaked but I seriously doubt it. I wouldn't be surprised if we see non planar antialiasing as stock at twice the speed and half the loudness, making what we use today once again become a waste of filament. Disposable low cost crap makes a whole lot more sense imo.
Remember the first gen Makerbots? Horrid overbuilt machines with glass beds, mandatory raft, quality barely worth a mention. They cost 5k and were obsolete in like two years tops. That's roughly how I see Pruša's approach as well.
If we actually valued local skills in the EU we'd have subsidies that make them competitive, ergo we do not. Personally I don't really see any for-profit surviving past going into the dark pattern hole eventually, there's too many incentives. Best just take what's best and least locked down today and run with it, assume it will vanish tomorrow. Forget long term support. Luckily there's always someone else willing to burn VC money in the initial market flood phase lmao.
> 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.
"We forced every user of every printer, worldwide, to interact with their printer through our centralized servers. This caused service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users."
There, I fixed it for you Bambu. You may use it under Creative Commons.
Seems like making the slicer only able to talk to the printer via the cloud was a bad way to do things, where any issue results in “instability felt by all users.”
This is false. After the authorization-related firmware changes last year LAN mode doesn't allow 3rd party slicers to connect.
LAN mode is also abandonware with numerous issues and missing features that they've had no interest in fixing. Orca slicer has had to rely on hacky workarounds in Bambu's buggy networking plugin just to be able to connect to printers in a different subnet.
https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/4512
> I can connect to my P2S in LAN mode with OrcaSlicer just fine (currently using the latest 2.4.0 nightly).
You either haven't updated the firmware or you also enabled "Developer mode" which has its own issues.
> This is a separate issue, I think even Bambu Studio can't connect to printers in LAN mode on a different subnet.
It's not a separate issue, it's a long-standing bug in their proprietary networking plugin that they refuse to fix. Orca slicer has implemented a hacky workaround so it actually works there.
A conspiracy-theory steelmanning interpretation of that statement is that Bambu thinks that some unscrupulous Chinese manufacturer is performing DDoS attacks against them, but can't fully and publicly admit to that for legal reasons.
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 have no issues with OrcaSlicer and interacting with my printers or starting prints remotely as long as I have LAN and Developer mode turned on. The only catch is that you need something like Tailscale set up for remote printers so you can access them over your "local" network. You can also get remote management/monitoring on your phone with apps like Openbu or Lanbu.
Setting aside that you're putting words in the other party's mouth, you're clearly entitled to do exactly that when the product is sold as having various functionality that depends on the cloud service. If you tell me my new toaster can send a live video of my bagel to my phone then I am entitled to receive that functionality without being subject to your shitware.
> I can no longer use OrcaSlicer to interact with my printers (e.g. sync filaments) and start prints remotely.
The remote interaction with the printer goes via their cloud.
> If you tell me my new toaster can send a live video of my bagel to my phone then I am entitled to receive that functionality without being subject to your shitware.
No you aren't. You might be able to use 3rd party clients, but this is never a given. BambuLab owns their cloud servers, they can choose which clients they will allow to use them.
Well I guess we'll have to agree to disagree because we have a fundamental difference in our view here. If they advertised the printer as having certain functionality that relied on their cloud and if the printer was also advertised as working (with full functionality) with third party clients then they don't have the right to later try to block people from using those cloud services.
A SaaS company enjoys full control of their cloud servers and licenses use of their proprietary webapp to you. A hardware company sell a physical product that you own and is not morally allowed to yank functionality later. As far as I'm concerned their cloud servers are part of their product and that's a hill I'm willing to die on. Anything short of that is a blatant bait and switch.
I'd be willing to settle for them offering fully refunded returns to all affected customers who want it. Failing that I'd expect the court system to award appropriate damages. This sort of scenario is literally what consumer protection laws were created for.
Edit: I (and many others) might be operating under a misunderstanding? It looks like all (?) the advertised functionality might be available (at least for now) locally via MQTT. But I'm not entirely clear on that. https://github.com/Doridian/OpenBambuAPI/blob/main/mqtt.md
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 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.
If I give you a template for a postcard, it doesn’t give you the right to send it with “signed, ricardobeat” at the end. These are orthogonal concerns.
They could very well enforce login for the entire app, that doesn’t require any closed source code and everyone would be worse off.
It does if you make the card self destruct if you don't write "signed, ricardobeat" on it. Courts have been over this in the 1990s with Nintendo. The Gameboy wouldn't boot any game that didn't start with "signed, Nintendo" so game companies just put that there and it wasn't illegal.
(Later, a trick was found to replace the signature and still boot, but it required extra chips in the game cartridge)
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).
In general, I agree with you. However, to extend your analogy a bit further, so that it applies to _this_ situation: suppose you buy said house. When the former owner hands over the keys, you copy them. Then, one day, you enter the house using the copied key. The former owner can't really be all that upset, can they?
1. You bought the house.
2. They gave you a key, which implies that you have permission to use it.
3. Is the problem really the _copy_ of the key?
With no authentication it's a "gates down" scenario and it's assumed that if you put your server on the open internet you intend people to connect to it.
With authentication it's "gates up" and then "without authorization" from CFAA kicks in. I think it's unlikely that a user agent string creates a "gates up" situation, especially not if it's from code granted under a permissive license.
If I build their slicer, not modifying any line of code, then accessed using that binary, would that be acceptable? If not, why not, considering it is identical to what is on their website?
If I made any changes prior to building, would it still be acceptable? And if not, where is the line? What is the legal basis, any precedent? How much of the code may I modify before I cross an invisible threshold and somehow "bypass" an "authentication" (neither fit UA anyways, either for law or other purposes unless one can provide any evidence that it ever has).
Even if that’s correct, Bambu has a right to then press charges on the users, but can’t really complain about the guy simply copying AGPL software to make it work. He’s not the one doing the illegal part.
Bambu clearly didn’t want to press charges on their users, though, so they weaponized the law to try and prevent this, and it’s causing them issues.
In any case, we’re not in some “only the laws matter” reality, we’re also have ethics and morals to consider, in which case Bambu is clearly in the wrong. If they want to secure their servers, they should do it properly rather than using legal threats.
"Press charges" - as if this were some Simple Assault. The CFAA isn't something one "chooses" to levy or not, these are crimes against the United States of America and it is solely up to the discretion of a US Attorney to prosecute.
A US Attorney prosecuting anyone on behalf of Chinese business interests isn't a good look politically, though, and that's often a factor.
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.
I checked and in that case [0] specifically, the court specifically doubted that such access was violating any applicable laws. Course, it got vacated before that could be properly addressed and this seems to be specific to NJ so if someone knows a broader case, happy to read up, but to me this makes the argument stronger that there is no reason to just presume such a "bypass" (if that counts, many of us have "bypassed" a lot via reading robots.txt, etc. in our youth) is inherently illegal. Again, happy to read if someone can provide a source saying something else. If Bambu want to argue EULA, go ahead, but let us not give these entities the ability to just wish something illegal because they simply dislike it, when there is no evidence it is.
Am currently somewhat into the topic of UAs for a personal project (not connected to Bambu printers), so am honestly interested for any tangible information, I just dislike us assuming something illegal because a corporate entity views it in a negative light.
[0] https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/131816p.pdf ("We also note that in order to be guilty of accessing “without authorization, or in excess of authorization” under New Jersey law, the Government needed to prove that Auernheimer or Spitler circumvented a code- or password-based barrier to access. See State v. Riley, 988 A.2d 1252, 1267 (N.J. Super. Ct. Law Div. 2009). Although we need not resolve whether Auernheimer’s conduct involved such a breach, no evidence was advanced at trial that the account slurper ever breached any password gate or other code-based
barrier. The account slurper simply accessed the publicly facing portion of the login screen and scraped information that AT&T unintentionally published.")
There was more than one court involved. He was convicted. Then he appealed and the appeals court vacated the conviction. So from one perspective, "the law" as a whole decided that he wasn't guilty. From another perspective, he still got involuntary lodging courtesy of the state.
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) and Bambu is not happy.
Edit: On re-reading, it seems to me the fork is still calling Bambu's servers. It's just bypassing some things.
You must put authorization on your server if you don't want others connecting to it.
While the right of access is not granted by AGPL - it is not reasonable to run a public service with an AGPL client and say you shouldn't be connecting to it.
They are doing a lot of work to create implied consent under CFAA.
If you want to control access you must do something to control access - it must reach a threshold, it cannot just be a public user agent string.
> You must put authorization on your server if you don't want others connecting to it.
Unfortunately, the CFAA doesn't necessarily require that authorization is implemented through technical means, and it definitely doesn't require any authorization to be technically robust.
The point is that they distributed AGPL licensed software which legally speaking puts them on very thin ice if they say "actually you're not allowed to modify that software we gave you and explicitly told you you could modify to do whatever you want."
This is a direct quote from the Affero GPL:
> When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid
circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention
is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to
the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or
modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's
users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of
technological measures.
The thing Bambu is doing is very much against the spirit of the AGPL, which is the license they chose for the Bambu printer software. And the AGPL has such broadly written language it's hard to believe what they are doing complies with the letter.
Again, legally that's correct. But it goes completely against the spirit of open source and especially the GPL which says in the license itself that "our General Public Licenses are intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program". If you can't run a modified version of a program without getting sued, you practically speaking do not have the freedom to modify it.
Elsewhere, the GNU explains why this is important[1]:
> With proprietary software, the program controls the users, and some other entity (the developer or “owner”) controls the program. So the proprietary program gives its developer power over its users. That is unjust in itself; moreover, it tempts the developer to mistreat the users in other ways.
> [...]
> Freedom means having control over your own life. If you use a program to carry out activities in your life, your freedom depends on your having control over the program. You deserve to have control over the programs you use, and all the more so when you use them for something important in your life.
Telling your users they can't run modified versions of your open source client goes against this principle.
Again, I'm not necessarily saying Bambu isn't within their legal rights to do this, I'm just saying it's a jerk move.
"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.
I am an outsider on the details of the Bambu software requiring users to go through their servers in China and the closing of their software.
Still I suspect it is about spying in wartime, Bambu printers are at the core of the Ukrainian war effort, the main reason even Ukraine is winning since januari 2026.
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.
Yeah. I just bought a new p1s last week and today hooked it up, never connected it to anything but power. Printing from the SD card worked first try, zero issues.
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].
> 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.
What you write sounds like an invitation to pro-Russia-minded people to sabotage these free Bambu firmware efforts. :-)
the kill switch is discussed in part 2 https://youtu.be/za62IvbfzXE?t=1061 by the fire department who got the drone donated by the interviewer from "Protrct Ukraine"
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:
1) I have heard of the kill switches being used from several sources in the Ukraine ministry of defense. I advised them on how to remove the kill switches in two brands.
> 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.
I have informed a few 3D printer operators on how to do it themselves. But it is hard for these soldiers, they have other priorities.
It is not 'standing in their way', it is revealing the secret locations where the Ukranians drones are manufactured. Several of these factories where discovered and Russia bombed them.
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.
In practice Ukrainians have long moved to custom built drones for pretty much everything.
Picking up 3D printers that don't spy on you, modding them or even building custom ones is much easier than designing and building millions of custom drones, so I am sure they solved this long ago.
Like, really - a FDM printer is just a MCU board with a bunch of stepper drivers, a power supply, some frame, motors, thermistors & heating elements.
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.
As far as I can tell, they're just objecting to use of their cloud service. You can fork their software and use it with your own printer just fine, they just don't want you to use it with their cloud service, which its own terms of service for access.
I think it's an odd hill for them to die on, but it's not a totally unreasonable position - the cloud is other people's computers, other people can have rules about what you can do with their computers. Just because a client is open-source, doesn't mean you're allowed to use the server.
If you're using developer mode running everything locally (or remotely over your own VPN, like the author here) then I think this makes zero difference.
They're objecting to use of their cloud service, and they're also disabling local-only mode thus forcing use of their cloud service, and their software is required to be AGPL (because that's how they themselves received it) so they're required to allow you to clone it and modify it but they just don't want you to.
It's "I would like to take this free software so I don't have to write it, oh and by the way I want to make everyone dependent on me now for enshittification reasons, so kindly fuck off and let me use this software just by myself. I take, you no take. Understand?"
It's already gone. This whole issue kicked off in January 2025: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/qwL63 - your only options were to stay on older firmware (and even then, the T&C's are sketchy, it worries owners there's no guarantee Bambu won't change their mind) or, if you upgrade, you push everything through Bambu's cloud services forevermore, and no backsies. Only a handful of operations can then be done by directly talking to the device, from that point on it only speaks to its real owner, Bambu.
Bambu's blog mentions LAN Mode. What they fail to mention is that LAN Mode still requires their cloud service for authentication, i.e. they get to cut you off any time they want. They also removed the ability for third party software to talk directly to the printer, it instead has to go through their closed-source "Bambu Connect" handler running on the same computer, with very limited functionality, and only if Bambu Connect chooses to pass on the message.
Before: user can print via cloud or locally with custom slicer at the same time easier.
Some time in 2025: firmware updates make user choose between cloud XOR locally. Enabling local mode allows using custom slicer, but disables cloud printing or monitoring. Folks were up in arms because they wanted both, and openness.
Latest fork: a specific new custom slicer impersonates UA to submit print via bambu cloud, so it gives the pre-2025 experience.
Bambu sues this new fork. Actual OrcaSlicer working locally is fine.
Bambu didn’t sue, they sent a cease and desist letter. Just to be pedantic.
I don’t know what the fuss is about. This whole issue has nothing to do with the open source ecosystem.
It has everything to do with the part where Bambu does not authorize 3rd party programs to contact their cloud servers.
I totally agree that Bambu has their head up their ass here, but still, it’s not an issue that would make me want to choose another inferior or more difficult to use printer at this time.
I own a Bambu printer precisely because it’s the iPhone of printers. It’s a tradeoff.
If it ever enshittifies to the point of becoming a paperweight I’m personally not that worried about it. I paid under $300 multiple years ago for this printer. I know that’s not nothing and I don’t want to be wasteful but it’s not something I’ll be particularly upset about. It’ll be Bambu’s loss when I don’t buy their next products or when I stop buying their replacement parts and filament.
I'm in a similar boat to you. I understand the current drama, but for my intended use case (an occasional-use tool sitting on a workbench in my garage) LAN mode has been fine and entirely removed from the drama.
I don't want an open source slicer sending prints through their cloud services, because I don't want their cloud services. The value of being able to check on a print or start it from my phone is near-zero. I shoot it off a laptop in my office and check on it intermittently during the print from that same laptop. This has worked fine to-date on my machine, but the concern is clearly that Bambu's corporate interest is not in that use-case, it's getting as much of the ecosystem in-house as possible. They want to control the model side via markerworld, and have everything flow through the cloud.
One doesn't need to assume bad intent, there's pretty clear financial and UX incentives here that mirror a lot of Apple for example. But I don't think I'm out of line for not wanting to move towards that world under a company with Chinese ownership and in an environment where many western lawmakers are pushing for strict control of what the machines can be used for. It's a lot easier to implement DRM, copyright protections, and restrictions on what can be printed in a cloud-only world than one where open source software is sending gcode to a local printer.
I've got no need or intent to replace my machine, but the next one likely won't be a bambu. They're not the only ones who are now making a machine where it works as a tool and you don't need to have 3d printing be your hobby to be productive with it.
My understanding is that you got your printer when the firmware was not blocking you from doing all of that. Right now if you want to remote print (and don't want to do it via sending models to Bambu Cloud), you can get away if you enable LAN only and developer mode. However, what if the newer firmware forces you to create an online account and connect to Bambu cloud to do the setup? What if Bambu decides to limit the features you can use if you print using a SD card? It has been quite a worrying trend, and now the company is trying to legally threaten an open-source developer building on top of Bambu's AGPL code trying to make remote print without going through Bambu servers possible. Other ppl more knowledgeable on the issue, please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the situation.
> 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
Why do you have to do that on a product you own that is running in your home?
Because you should never fully trust any IoT product that you don't truly have control over. There's nothing stopping a faulty or malicious update from being pushed out, or their update servers being compromised (see notepad++ recently). So why increase your risk, if you don't truly need it online?
Because (like every IoT product) Bambu want to sell a product with an easy app-powered workflow, and LAN device discovery and remote-access for home devices from mobile apps is flaky and terrible.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're slurping telemetry en route, and it's convenient for them that using their app helps nudge you towards Makerworld (their ecosystem for 3d prints, which is presumably good marketing) but I very strongly suspect "make it effortless for non-technical users to use the device with just a phone" was the original & primary driver.
Not to mention the fact that some people think of WiFi and cellular data as "things that give me access to the internet". The understanding of what a private IP address is and why it can't be reached from a cellular connection is just not there.
Others want to control their IoT when they're not at home or not in WiFi range (they may not even notice the latter). You can do it with a VPN, or perhaps port forwarding if you're lucky enough to have access to your router and no carrier-grade NAT, but that's even harder to set up.
3d printer users are more sophisticated than most, but I can imagine some artsy types owning them, as well as the kind of people who are very comfortable with a drill, soldering iron and a jackhammer, but who treat a computer as "that God-damned machine I need to use to buy the parts I need."
I've tried to download a model from MakerWorld and it told me I need to create an account first. That told me what I needed to know about that service & was not really surprising from Bambulab.
Well you are still supporting a company that is turning out to be objectively more and more evil & need to do crazy stuff that would be insanity for any other 3D printer ("block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry").
That automatically disqualifies Bambulab from my PoV.
They don’t perceive that their principles are being violated. They asked nicely for a general explanation. How about giving them an equally nice answer in return instead of issuing a combative condemnation of their character?
Did you install the network connector Orca slicer prompted you to download? It's a closed source blob that runs on your PC which I'm presuming you haven't air-gapped as well.
TBF this was the case prior to the firmware change. It wasn't a bait and switch. It just wasn't obvious to someone buying a printer they thought worked with open source slicers.
> I find it doubly ironic since their own fork caused Bambu users' telemetry to hit Prusa's servers back in 2022, and (to my knowledge) Prusa didn't snap back with a C&D.
I bought a Bambu Labs A1 Mini. It cost $199, on sale. I plugged it in and started printing excellent prints.
Previously I bought an Ender printer for around the same amount. Never did get it to work. I'm not an engineer or a mechanic. I have other technical hobbies, astronomy for example. I tried making a telescope mirror with results similar to the Ender printer. I buy ready made telescopes, not telescope kits.
I have immense admiration for those who can and will make telescopes and 3D printers. I'm very interested in the base technology. But when I want to print something, or look at a faint fuzzy, I just want the system to work.
(Interestingly, I actually like star hopping, the process of finding an observation target with a finder scope and star charts. Go to telescopes have no interest for me. Go figure ...)
To me this seems like a failure of the U.S. corporate/economic system. We should be able to make a 3D printer that simply works. We should be able to make a drones that work as well as the DJI drones. (My understanding is that Bambu Labs was started by a group of former DJI engineers.).
I don't have any solutions here. Not buying a Bambu Labs printer means I don't get to print things in 3D. I would pay more, but whenever I look into the various alternatives that I'm assured are turnkey, they turn out to not be turnkey. And if my Bambu printer breaks I can generally buy a new one cheaper than paying someone who knows what they are doing to fix it.
I'll admit this kind of offends my geek sensibilities. I actually agree, at least emotionally, with Geerling. But I also agree that the U.S. military industrial complex should be able to make excellent consumer facing 3D printers.
If I were doing commerce with the 3D printer I almost certainly would be using something else. Maybe. For what its worth, I'm basically printing out puppet mechanisms and art figures. Occasionally a wall hook or missing part for something that I happen on a STL file for.
In short, these Chinese companies are pushed by the state, in essentially massive dumping. And not only that, they get Chinese hardware patents granted on open inventions from the wider 3D printing community as their own creation & then try to push those spurious patents also in the West.
Great points. Using their printer "rooted" or with custom firmware seems like a decent compromise to me, kind of like what graphene is doing with pixels
If I had an actual need that wasn't being met, I might buy one of their printers just to root and run with custom firmware. I might just do it for the fun of it. Even with tariffs their printers are only running around $220 at Best Buy.
However, even that sounds suspiciously like a project in and of itself. I haven't had time to design and print anything in the last month. So I expect I'll keep rolling along like I am. Things could always change, though.
> Louis Rossmann posted a video saying he'd pledge $10,000 to help the open source dev fight Bambu's legal threats. And I'd happily chip in too, but that's only useful if the dev wants to put himself back in Bambu's crosshairs.
Here's what I don't get. How is infra load any different between someone using their slicer build, and someone using their code in another slicer (or a fork)? It's still (ultimately) the same human making the same requests. If they can't handle the load then the solution is to obviously carefully manage the supply of the printers, if your infra is incapable of handling more than 3 users (accurate figure going by the tone of their blog post), then don't have more than 3 of your printers in the wild at any single time. Problem solved.
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.
They had that chance to create proper auth and api for years and many developers and myself have been asking for it. Never happened, and I suspect will never happen.
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.
>When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.
This doesn't apply because their cloud service, which has the "technological measure" is not the "covered work", as incompetent as the measure might be...
Even with a user agreement I think they need to gate their service behind that agreement, otherwise the agreement is optional and open ports are open for use.
You still need to form a valid contract - no notice, no assent, no contract.
If there's a gate that's being bypassed then this all changes but it doesn't seem like there is - and it doesn't seem like they can add one without breaking existing printers.
In this case, you're signing up for an account and entering into the user agreement to do so. There's a whole separate legal discussion to be had about the whole "scroll past it all and just click accept to make it to away" thing...
Another way to read it is that they are shifting blame away from their backend - which is so shitty that it experiences notable service disruptions when some of their existing users send unexpected headers - onto the client software.
There is a Bambu p1s on its way to me. I will exclusively print ASA and my impression was that the p1s has a good track record with ASA.
My prints will be mounted in glider cockpits and require the UV resistance.
Money is a bit tight, so I decided against prusa as my first printer.
I am curious if anyone has good experiences with alternatives for the p1s with regards to ASA printing?
Yeah .. nah. Bang for the buck the Bambu mashines are just really good. And X2D even has a heated chamber. If you don't have the cash for a Prusa, but want similar levels of "just works"™ there sadly are not many options.
I mean I print ASA with my Voron, but that is build it yourself and high level of tinkering.
There are alternatives like QIDI Q2. But .. it will probably not be as fire and forget as Prusa or Bambu.
It's by far not the only Chinese 3D printer manufacturer that completely disregards open-source licenses. There's also Anycubic Slicer Next, which is essentially a reskinned OrcaSlicer with additional presets for Anycubic printers, yet you won't find its source code anywhere, not even if you request it via email.
I don't care if my 3d printer is "open" any more than I care if my refrigerator is "open". I get that for a lot of you it's a hobby that you want a dedicate a lot of time to, upgrading, hacking, etc.. which is great. But for me, I just want something that prints when I need it to print. The fewer minutes per month that I have to spend thinking about or interacting with my 3d printer, while still getting great prints, the better. And that is what Bambu has nailed better than anyone else, as far as I'm aware.
Your fridge became dependent on updates. Then they added ads to front panel. Then they'll say that you need a subscription to use holiday mode. Then it no longer receives update and touch panel stops working because it can't connect to servers and you'll need to buy a new one or buy an upgraded touch panel for $99 instead of $199 if you'll buy it this week.
Well, I too, don't have anything against a company selling a "good but not open printer", and I don't care if my fridge is open.
However, I hope you see that the behavior reported by Jeff here is just bad. They are either not understanding open source licenses or are acting in bad faith.
The issue is not that they sell 3d printers with proprietary software. The issue is altering the deal _after_ you have purchased the printer. People bought a printer that was open. Then suddenly the company changed their mind and pushed an update that made it non open. And when people try to restore the software to the state it was when bought, the company fights such attempts with dmca requests. If I bought something it's mine and I can do whatever I want with it and run whatever software I want on it.
Yeah this practice needs to end. You buy a stack of hardware+software that does X.
Imagine if pizza consisted of software and hardware and you only bought hardware but software could be changed by dev/seller. Now your pizza shrunk in size, changed taste, or could only be eaten by a fork that is supplied for free by the pizzashop, otherwise special chemical compounds would make it disintegrate if you'd try to eat it using your hands or anything else. Technically you still have that pizza you bought...
Then you sound like the type of client that perfectly fits Bambu's profile. Now, don't come complaining when Bambu decides you need a monthly subscription to use the slicer, or whatever rent-seeking they come up with in the future. Remember, you are paying extra for the privilege of not thinking, and you bought into that arrangement fully aware.
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.
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.
There are many valid criticisms one can make about Bambu Lab, but the constant overreactions to everything they do is so tiring. Somebody at their company saw a fork with their own company name on it, impersonating their own client auth code, and sent a C&D.
The receiver of the C&D should see a lawyer about what changes or user-facing messages might get Bambu to back off. This is a normal, solvable business disagreement, not an excuse for everyone to get their pitchforks out again.
Also: I run multiple Bambu printers offline and they all work fine via sneakernet without anyone's files going anywhere. People should stop acting like these devices are bricks when used without internet access.
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?
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.
> 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.
One aspect of this may be Chinese laws, which I am assuming if they don't already require the ability to monitor or even censor what gets printed, they will soon. Even in the US we are starting to have legislation related to blocking firearm component printing, but this doesn't necessarily mean central servers do it or have access to everything printed. Yet.
I think the primary problem is actually more than just Bambu's behavior, it's that China is an authoritarian country, and most of the population not only accepts the idea of central servers monitoring and "moderating" behavior but largely may embrace it as a sensible thing to do. It's probably beyond Stockholm Syndrome to the point of much of the culture genuinely not completely even understanding the idea of why privacy and personal control is important.
Much of the United States is so far on the other side that they can't begin to understand the position Bambu is in. Large companies in that country just do not have the option to allow their users to bypass censorship and monitoring.
I do think it's actually great that this type of issue gets in everyone's face though and it's great people are fighting back. But realize that the problem is deeper than one company. It's the whole type of government and attitude towards it and technology.
They are sonosing it. Their online-first shift is them doing the same thing that Sonos pulled.
Which degraded their hardware usability so much, that it's literally much worse than a decade ago. Even basic functions like choosing which speaker should play or ... what content to play does not work properly.
Here is my perspective as someone who has not started 3d-printing yet, but is interested to give it a try:
I'm a confused about the whole "3D printer sends prints to its manufacturer's server" issue. Because I wouldn't want to connect hardware device like a 3D-printer to a network in the first place.
Can I buy a Bambu Lab printer and just never hook it up to any network?
Will I be able to print from sd-card just fine?
Can I update the firmware from an sd-card?
If these two are possible, I would not have any problems with such a device. If they are not, I would not even think about getting such a device.
And when it comes to slicing software: Can I use any slicing software and all I have to do is load the hardware info of the Bambu Lab printer I want to use? Or do I have to use Bambu Lab Studio or a fork like Orca Slicer for some reason?
And while we are at it: Does command line slicing software exist? I wouldn't want to dabble with a GUI. I would want to define the parameters of a print job in a yaml or json file and then slice it like "./slice.sh config.yaml myobject.stl"
I'll play devil's advocate. What is Bambu Lab's motivation to provide lifetime free cloud services for a onetime revenue transaction? They could demand a subscription. But they probably know for casual users this would be unwelcome. They could seek to monetize via other means like ads or cross and up-sell. Third party clients are a risk to these.
I don't see the ground the OSS community are standing on to demand Bambu provide free services.
OK - so Bambu has harassed legitimate F/OSS projects.
Serious question: why not just release whatever you want but not tie it to your identity? Bambu demands OcraSlicer make changes under threat of litigation? OK, cool. Enjoy the 5,000 forks of OcraSlicer that implement that functionality in exactly the same way. Hell, post a notice that they were compelled to remove the feature, and that they're thereform removing the release x.y.z, with the sha256 hash of "...".
Now OrcaSlicer has complied, and the community has an semi-official way to make sure that the commits that were removed aren't modified when they get them from other sources.
Why should people be forced to distance themselves from their public service work in order to be safe from abuse?
Another aspect is that releasing something under copyleft without putting an identity behind it is toothless. Someone can copy it and now if you want to go after them, you need to out yourself anyway.
I'm with Jeff here and I basically had the same journey: My X1C is still going strong, running in developer mode but I'm not gonna throw it out the window. I won't gonna buy another product from Bambu Lab, ever again, tho.
New product launches by them feel less exiting (I don't want/need laser engraving capabilities in my 3D printer) and I agree with other commenters that these days, there are good alternatives. Unfortunately I have to say that wasn't around the time I bought the printer. When you just wanted to print things without making 3D printing a hobby, their machines were a no-brainer!
But yeah, bye bye Bambu Lab.
Only thing that's more annoying than their blog posts trying to "set things straight" is the "we told you so" crowd.
> every file you print goes through Bambu's servers
The Chinese government subsidizes Bambu Labs, so it's pretty easy to understand why this is such a big deal for them. It's not like the CCP wants to democratize manufacturing. They want the data.
IDK anything about 3d printing, but is their online service so complicated that people can't create an open source self hosted alternative? If they can already take the LAN version and send spoofed requests to their servers, they can do the same to a new fully open server.
Surely people can check the traffic and build a server to answer similarly, no? Or is this much more than job management?
Maybe this is impossible and I'm talking out of my ass, but for me it seems like a perfect opportunity to completely remove the problematic party from the equation.
The printer firmware is proprietary, cannot be easily changed anymore, and does certificate pinning for the cloud functionality. LAN mode does not expose the same functionality as the cloud.
I learned this less the hard way (and probably for the tenth time) with Anker.
I love their 3d printer. It "just works" like none I had before it.
But now they've killed their 3d printer business and all their stuff is absolutely dependent on their web services. So that thing is up shit creek without a paddle whenever they flip that switch.
It really hurts to think about replacing an expensive, WORKING thing just because it became abandonware.
> they can see everything you ever print on your printer
This will be the only legal way to own a 3D printer if WA HB 2320 or CA AB 2047 are passed. If you don't like it, call your representatives immediately.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 wish they weren't privacy invading, and abusing open source, but I love how good the printers are. I want to print practical things, not continually fix design flaws in the printer (as was the case with the Creality Ender).
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
Same! I was burned by Chamberlain, twice. In my case I had bought a $40 retrofit device (it connected to the MyQ cloud and simply used RF to emulate a remote to open any brand of opener).
First, there was their debacle where they broke HA connectivity just for fun, meaning I couldn't use HA or Apple HomeKit anymore. Then, after a pretty routine reset of the opener (I needed to clear out some old remotes and re-learn them) I found that in some recent update of the 'app' or whatever, they'd deleted my brand of opener from their supported list, due to some IP dispute of some kind, leaving it unable to learn the same remote it had learned the year before. So, as peeved as I had been to have to use their ad-laden app, the myQ device itself was completely useless to me.
Never again.
Irony is I just moved to a house with a brand new MyQ cloud-connected door. I bought a RatGDO anyway and will never buy any of the devices in the myQ ecosystem, even though some look attractive. Closed system on purpose = never buy.
Though I'm not OP, I will say that it seems like there are two brands that mostly have the market cornered.
Chamberlain/Liftmaster/MyQ is all the same company; they are a gross company that hates the idea of giving you control over your device. Zero LAN control story, Zero Homekit story, zero Home Assistant and no possibility of any of these.
Genie - whose "app" thing is called Aladdin Connect is the other one. There is a HA integration[1] for it, though it's cloud-dependent, no LAN story so again your ability to control it is subject the company's cloud servers being available, and to any future whim they may have. The Github for the plugin has issues reported, but no idea how widespread they are.
Looking at places like Home Depot it seems there's a brand called SkyLink[2] but it seems cheap in the bad way, and while it has its own "app" there seems to be no HA story whatsoever, so I assume kinda the worst of all.
Deeply uncomfortably, I would have to grudgingly acknowledge the practicality of buying from the gross Chamberlain, never using its MyQ BS, and connecting a RatGDO to it instead, which would give the best experience, even though giving them any business deeply offends me.
Please read my comment again - I mentioned RatGDO and literally own one. My point was that there's no possibility Chamberlain would ever give you any of these things in the built-in Wi-Fi-connected hardware you've already paid them for.
It is unfortunate to reward those weasels for their bad behavior by buying their device, even if one substitutes their own "brain" and never uses MyQ. But yeah, that may be the only practical option.
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.
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.
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 bought one a few months back when it was weirdly cheap (£260 delivered!) and it's been really very solid. I've only had a couple of issues:
1. One of the bed temperature sensors reported a fault, this was a loose connection and took about 10 minutes to open and reseat, which was nice
2. I sometimes get an error in Chinese that blocks a print and requires pressing a continue button on the touchscreen. I've tried translating this and I have no idea what it's on about, so if anyone does know what it is then lemme know. Doesn't cause me much trouble though
Overall I'm really pleased with it - it's pretty much a bargain. Mine has never been connected to the internet and very rarely has print failures (and they're nearly all my fault when I have had them). I've ordered the multi-filament addon which they've just announced, and I was pleased to see them offer that as an upgrade for purchasers of the first model.
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).
Yeah i got a CC1 due to price alone (Prusa was out of my range but obviously vastly preferred), and then they started trying to pull bullshit with firmware. They backed off after outrage, but don't forget that this is exactly what Bambu initially tried to do - so it will be the first and last Elegoo that I purchase.
Printer is great though. I've never used a Bambu, but after a thorough round of Orca calibration this (at the time) newbie was able to get some really decent PCTG and even PA-CF prints.
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.
Apple is building things in house and closed source. They also don't throw their weight around with small developers like this.
This article isn't about the fact that Bambu has a walled garden. They're slandering and suing an OSS developer for using open source code that Bambu published. And the reason Bambu publishes open source code is because they're heavily reliant on the open source community.
I agree their printers are good, and good printers help the market, but this behavior is unconsciounable and needs to have consequences.
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)
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.
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.
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.
This is the dude that creams himself everytime Apple releases a computer, he doesn't give a lick about ownership at a principled level, only if it affects him personally.
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.
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'm supportive of Jeff's general philosophy towards open source, but this feels a little disingenuous. Did Bambu mishandle the situation? Absolutely. But we need to stop vilifying companies for being cloud-first. The reality is that 99% of their users set up the printer and app using the cloud service. It's easy and convenient. The slicer is still open source, and you can still use their printers without the cloud. (Yes there was some fighting after their security issue in 2025, but they did put in an effort to maintain compatibility with third party slicers even if it was misguided and/or out of touch.
Bambu has every right to restrict or limit how their cloud service is used, even if they do it in a completely insecure and trivially reproducible way (a user agent).
I'm curious from a legal perspective - the user agent in the Bambu slicer is AGPLed, so copyright wise it seems anyone could put it in their own slicer too. Nonetheless, something feels wrong to me about saying you're a Bambu slicer when you're actually not. Bambu is going after it because of the user agreement, but is there any other legal standing for complaint?
I think it's more disingenuous to call "trying to ruin a guy's life" "mishandling the situation". Also
* user agent spoofing has been common practice on the web for decades
* Bambu's customers were bait and switched here. They bought a printer that works locally, and Bambu wants to remove features from the product they paid for. And it's the _customer_ who's actually running this slicer and impersonating Bambu.
Imagine if you bought a car with Carplay/Android Auto. A year later, the manufacturer pushes an OTA update that locks Carplay behind a subscription. But they have terrible security, just trusting the car itself to say if it has a subscription, so you use use pirate software to bypass the restriction and get free Carplay.
This is a far more financially damaging outcome for the car manufacturer, closer to stealing than user agent impersonation, but I would still argue that its morally justified. Consumers should have a right to fight rug-pulls, especially a physical product. This behavior from companies would never have been acceptable before the internet.
They asked him to remove it and threatened to send a cease and desist. They didnt even send the cease and desist, which they very well could have. Hardly an accurate characterization.
> They bought a printer that works locally, and Bambu wants to remove features from the product they paid for. And it's the _customer_ who's actually running this slicer and impersonating Bambu.
This just isn't true. You can still run it locally and still use third party slicers locally.
> being cloud-first. The reality is that 99% of their users set up the printer and app using the cloud service
Part of me thinks that the particular kind of enshittification we've come to see with devices, where something that certainly needs no cloud has a hard cloud dependency baked in, is partly an accident of the networking environment everything has grown up in.
When broadband and then especially Wi-Fi caught on, using NAT was so practical, solving both the "how do we properly configure a firewall to only route good traffic" problem, and the "we don't have enough routable IPs for every smart toaster or baby monitor to get one."
Only after this reality and assumption had been completely baked into every home network and the devices used to build those networks, then we started to see IoT devices, which really benefit from remote access. Companies added cloud because it was the only way to make that work - and most of them didn't want to implement and support a different protocol for LAN usage when that wouldn't sell any more devices.
I wonder if we had started out with ipv6 before the wi-fi boom happened, and every device had a routable address, and wi-fi routers always had good firewalls, and UPNP had not launched with immediate security issues... I wonder if we would have seen much more direct connectivity enabled by companies who given the choice, would rather sell a device that didn't need anything from them to support, instead of a device they're obligated to run servers for (at least for a few years).
This is not necessarily true. There are technical solutions to preserve privacy, end to end encryption being a very common one. That being said, Bambu strikes me as a very competent 3D printer designer, but not so much a competent software designer.
> rental model
I don't think this really applies to a hardware company selling 3D printers. You can always still use SFTP or SD cards to print. A big selling point for them is the ecosystem and being able to, for example, find a model on the app while you're on the road, send it to your printer, and have it be done by the time you get home. If this weren't cloud enabled, most of their customers wouldn't be able to get it to work because things like VPN or tailscale are well beyond them.
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.
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.
Oh, I wasn't aware of that. I knew that it would by possible by sole fact that you have computer with network interface attached as a printer but I didn't know it have mechanism exactly for this purpose.
> 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
It could be enough if the nozzle just stops moving while touching the model being printed - based on the type of material, it might start burning.
And if you want to be outright malicious, you can disable maximum temperature control and do the same with much hotter nozzle rammed into the model - and even print an extra burnable model when you are at it!
Or count on the power supply or the wiring catching fire instead due to overload.
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.
I would have never done this 10 years ago with the garbage printers that were pieced together like science projects rather than finished products.
But a modern enclosed bambu printer is a much better engineered device. Bambu is mature enough as a company that they've issued formal recalls for device issues before. This would never happen with the aliexpress specials that used to dominate the market.
Bambu printers (and other reputable modern printers) are being run unattended at scale all the time without issue.
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.
We built an enclosure fort our printers from a metal storage rack & added active ventilation that suck out any fumes outside the building. Still, you need to physically get there, check the bed is clean & start the print manually.
There are are also regular software checks for overheating or thermistor wiring failing & we know they are there and are enabled as we built the Marlin firmware ourself from source (which is quite easy once you properly configure it). Not to mention we are sure we are the ones in control over the firmware.
We also have a bunch of web cameras watching the printers print that we can monitor remotely.
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.
Anycubic is a poor quality brand that doesn't really go through the engineering effort to design good quality stuff. These types of printers definitely still exist, no doubt.
But, it's not really straight propaganda that the well designed machines (Bambu, Prusa, and many other vendors) don't have these issues.
You can find equally alarming statements about all sorts of other poor quality goods.
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".
> Homeowners insurance rarely actually covers everything lost in a fire,
Why wouldn't it? Unless you don't have enough coverage, it should cover all losses fully. Literally the point of insurance. You may not properly claim everything lost, but that's on you. Insurance claims 101: giving a very clear itemized list of everything lost in an insurance claim.
> and takes years to pay out in many cases.
Years? Why would it take years? Maybe 6-12 months, but you can get claims rolling relatively quickly. Most of the time is probably going to be your time spent itemizing all the stuff lost.
When the risk of a printer catching on fire and burning down your house is very, very low, why wouldn't you rely on insurance? You have the draw the line somewhere.
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...
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.
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.
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”.
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.
You are conflating two things: appeasement and actual change in principles. Externally it can be hard to distinguish these, but it is easier to get a sense of it with more signals.
From Bambu’s historical and continued actions, specifically including the orca slicer actions that this blog post was about, there is additional signal that LAN mode backpedaling was more likely an appeasement action than a shift in principles to embrace a more open ecosystem.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
It is very dubious way to subvert GPL, even GPL2, not to mention [A]GPL3.
It was discussed many times that you cannot have close-sourced plugin for GPL host program, as loading plugin is linkage and it is covered by full GPL (only LGPL has linkage exclusion).
> 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 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: the core of macOS (Darwin) is open source. Does that mean everyone running Darwin or a fork of it should be able to use iCloud services for free?
All this outrage essentially sounds like "since Bambu Lab's slicer is open-source, the open-source community should be able to point any slicer at Bambu Lab's servers to get free remote monitoring services". And I don't think that's right.
> They aren't doing anything to block OrcaSlicer or any fork from working with the printer using LAN-only mode.
They did. Since the first update in early 2025 LAN-only mode isn't enough to use 3rd party software anymore. Eventually they (partially) caved to the extensive backlash and added "developer mode" which completely exposes your printer by removing existing access controls, coercing users into either giving up control, or giving up basic security in order to maintain full control of our printers.
It sounds like they're doing what people want. People seem to be ascribing a lot of mal-intent to actions that don't seem malicious to me.
> completely exposes your printer by removing existing access controls
If these printers are in LAN-only mode and you want to point 3rd-party software at them, don't you kind of expect the existing access controls (which are probably at least in part tied to cloud services) to be removed? Behind a LAN with developer mode on, you're generally going to (1) not be exposed to the internet anyway, and (2) probably know what you're doing and would be implementing access controls yourself anyway.
If you want a completely open (hardware and software) 3D printer, don't get a Bambu Lab machine I guess? A big part of the value of their printers is that they've managed to make everything so seamless. Some of that relies on a somewhat closed ecosystem. They're the Apple of 3D printers, but everyone keeps expecting them to be the Linux, just because their slicer (or parts of it anyway) is open-source. If openness is more important to you than those conveniences, go with a different brand. It's a good thing we have choices as consumers :)
> don't you kind of expect the existing access controls (which are probably at least in part tied to cloud services) to be removed
No, and it's absurd that you would suggest that on a technical forum in 2026, and no, they're not tied to cloud services in any way. Do you also grant root access to anyone on your LAN, by default and without credentials?
> If you want a completely open (hardware and software) 3D printer, don't get a Bambu Lab machine I guess? [and the rest]
My mistake, I didn't realize you were just here to engage in bad faith bullshit and peddle the company's PR statements from last year. These changes are happening after we already bought our printers.
I love my X1C. It's way ahead of any other 3D printer I've owned or built. I stuck it in a VLAN from day 1. Have had it in LAN-only mode for years. Works great. I haven't followed the company's PR statements, but seems a little strange that they would tell people not to get a Bambu Lab printer for any reason.
I'm sorry your experience has been so terrible or that you thought you were buying an open-ecosystem printer. I never got that impression, so I never expected it.
And in 2026, I wouldn't trust access controls on their own even if Bambu Lab did keep them enabled in this situation (who's to say they don't include a back door of their own?). I prefer security at the network level, enforcing access controls before any untrusted hosts can even see a machine that I want to protect on the network.
We've strayed so far off topic. Try to get a handle on your fanboyism and you might be able to see this discussion more rationally.
Why do you feel the need to justify your purchase in public and talk about how great the printer is? Bambu make good printers and nobody is disputing that.
And for the record, my own experience hasn't been terrible at all, it's been predominantly positive.
However that doesn't change the fact that their overall dishonest corporate behavior, pushing unjustified user-hostile changes after the sale, violating the AGPL license of Prusa slicer, and legally bullying independent developers is immoral, illegal, and generally indefensible. Nobody wants to live in a world where this sort of behavior is normalized.
Furthermore "LAN only mode" has been neglected and generally half-broken for years. It was a hobbled alternative before they broke it even further.
You do you, but the world has moved on since the 90s. Communication is expected to be end to end encrypted, credentials should be revocable, and you generally don't want to grant every process on your device unrestricted ability to set your house on fire.
Disgracefully, this is being done in the name of "security".
Wow, I'm surprised how much I disgree with the HN consensus here. This feels to me, (almost) entirely in Bambu's side here. I'd say their security sucks and they should have implemented some kind of secure accounts so random person without account can't interact with their service like 1000s of other services. But, otherwise, they're right that you don't have a license to their service, only to the AGPLed software.
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" in your thesis. 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.
If you use an unrooted Pixel, why are we even having this conversation, and if not.. well maybe the dude just wants to use a secure wallet.
Regardless of this influencer's "real life" persona I see nothing incongruent about even their "influencer" persona using an iPhone.
Therefore I see no relevance to anything in your original comment.
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.
> 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.
That would depend how much "safety" is built into the control system.
The simplest solution I've seen is taping up the edges of the enclosure where you find gaps, to prevent heat escaping.
If it's only PID-ing the bed, the ambient temperature shouldn't matter. Less work to do for the bed heater. On the nozzle, it's similar. A 40 C increase in ambient temperature isn't much compared to the 150 C+ that the control system is maintaining. Since the active parts of the printer must be capable of running at the target chamber temperature, there should be no risk unless you exceed it. The question is really, is the printer designed to operate continuously with a chamber of X C?
However... the risk would be that if it's too well insulated there isn't a good way for the system to cool quickly if it needs to, or if it somehow messes with what the control system is tuned for. On the older printers you could re-calibrate the PID loops to your specific hardware and environment. The newer 32-bit firmware seems to not require user tuning at all. Similarly with full enclosures, you might worry about the power supply or other electronics which aren't meant to be run at high ambient (maybe fine though).
You could also look at a separate solution like enclosing the printer in well-insulated chamber, and aiming to keep that outer space above ambient. That would be a good option if you're expecting a big thermal gradient to your workspace, like an unheated garage in winter.
But lots of questions really. Do you want to run at a high chamber temp? Are you running in a cold environment and having problems? Trying to save power? These are different scenarios.
Yep - indeed one important issue people often forget with enclosures is that any non trivial components that end up inside the heated enclosure need to be able to safely continue working at the increased air temperature inside + any heat they or other parts of the printer generate that affects them.
If you steppers are already hot at 22 degrees of room temperature, they might end up damaged if air is at 45 degrees + are in use and generate their own heat.
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).
Any tips on insulating the chamber?
Plexiglas + styroafoam?
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.
I put a blanket on in the winter. In the summer it's not really necessary, the chamber can hit 70c which triggers a cool-down.
How do you upgrade a Mk3 to a Core One?
Wow, that’s a lot of money on upgrades. I also got the MK3 and upgraded it once.
Full upgrade to the core one will be AUD$2k
I can keep my current printer alive for a long time. But it’s hard to justify the cost.
I am still a bit iffy about the whole sending out fleets of 100s of printers to influencers during the pandemic while also increasing the price for their entry lineup.
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.
Josef clearly cares about being as open as possible, but has bumped up against the fact that companies like Bambu can just take their designs and extend them with things they don't share, and sell a product with more features and a lower price.
Unfortunately, it seems like the fully open source business model doesn't work well when you can be undercut by extremely cheap labor from another country and a company that doesn't share or reciprocate your values.
It sucks. Also, fuck Bambu.
That other country is the company- and it can subsidize the frontend which you call a company with money earned by other monopoly frontends.
Think of china less as a country and more as one huge Chaebol.
Share what? Nothing what Bambu is doing is remotely secret. There are no mystery sauce to figure out. Prusa genuinely got outflanked by Bambu when it comes to designing a printer.
But yes, fuck bambu.
They forked the slicer, and then put the networking part in a plugin that gets downloaded after you open it purely so they don't have to share the source for it as the rest of the slicer is GPL.
I still remember running Red Hat Linux when it was free and open source, before Red Hat Enterprise Linux, before Fedora, before CentOS, before RockyOS...
It's tough to build a business around a product that takes a lot of capital to build, and you offer for free to your competitors...
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.
> They were so deeply undercut by Chinese clone vendors that buying Prusa made little sense to consumers.
There exist a lot of other buying criteria than price.
Their printers are no longer open source hardware, according to the definition endorsed by a certain Josef Pruša https://freedomdefined.org/OSHW#Endorsements
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.
Can you explain how releasing model files under a restrictive license vs not releasing model is a net restriction of the freedoms of end users and small businesses? The impression I'm getting is that if they locked away those files and never released them, you would have nothing to complain about.
This is like complaining about Valve letting game developers generate free Steam keys (=Valve doesn't get fees) that can be sold on other storefronts with the caveat that the developer must sell the keys for at least the same price he set on steam. Being allowed to sell those keys is a sign of goodwill, but the goodwill is conditional upon the source of goodwill not destroying itself. If you buy a game on the Humble Store, Valve won't get a single cent, most of the money goes to the developer, and yet Valve still has all of the ongoing infrastructure costs.
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.
The Chinese are very good at cloning, source code or not. Guess who they're cloning? Bambu.
The market leader gets cloned but somehow the market leader is still standing.
That market leader was previously Prusa. Prusa rested on their laurel and got outflanked.
They really are not deterrents.
Even if the unscrupulous entities cared about the license, they would just get their (already paid for) CAD person to reverse engineer every single necessary model over the course of a week. If an amateur like me can reliably do that in his spare time, imagine what a professional could do during an 8 hour shift.
But it doesn't matter either way because no unscrupulous entity is going to be dumb enough to publicly announce that they used the models to produce their clone.
If I manufacture a clone of a Prusa, there is no way for anyone to prove that I used the original 3D models. If it were possible to prove that, it would also be possible to "prove" that I copied 3D CAD models that I've never seen, which could put me in legal trouble. Reverse engineering is not a crime, and reverse engineering (and all the costs associated with manufacturing and prototyping[0]) likely _can_ reproduce a near identical Prusa printer.
As an aside, if you've seen the average Prusa clone, it's often quite far from the original design. Almost nobody 1:1 cloned Prusas back when that was a thing, because the Prusa design didn't cut corners. Those clones would often use designs which were probably derived from the original, and were unpublished. Why didn't Prusa go after them for this? He should have had just as much luck given that those manufacturers were potentially in breach of the GPL.
In summary, the OCL cannot actually stop clones, because if it did, we'd have some serious problems with our legal systems, prohibiting perfectly legal reverse engineering (irrespective of if the cloners did the reverse engineering or not).
It _only_ stops people who are honest enough to state that their designs are derived from Prusa's models. People who weren't a threat to begin with, and who now are voluntarily subscribing to legal issues if they ever felt like selling a Prusa modification without Prusa's approval.
The real deterrents are:
* Design complexity
* Extreme amounts of competition (almost nobody would buy a prusa clone these days unless they _wanted_ to have an almost broken printer to force them to learn how to make it work reliably). We have cheap, good, first party 3D printer designs.
[0]: To clarify, when I say prototyping, this needs to happen irrespective of if you reverse engineer or not. Once you have the models, which will be true to life, you still have to "reverse engineer" the tools/dies/materials/etc, for which Prusa sensibly does _not_ offer the models.
So you want European companies to keep being nice and "open", do all the research and invent new technologies and products for the chinese to copy and sell cheap clones of!
They could have simply asked EU to introduce protective tariffs. I don't think they even tried, though.
How would that have helped in their other markets?
Basically every "AWS ate open core company lunch thread" is filled with people arguing that releasing your products under an open source license is immoral because the company didn't foresee that a hosting provider is going to swallow them in 8 years to the point where the project would have to be abandoned. However, the immorality doesn't lie in the death of the project, no. The immorality lies in the continued existence of the project under a slightly more restrictive license.
It's always a headscratcher when you try to eeke out a living and are told that you have to work for a company writing proprietary software to have the right to work on an open source project. Wouldn't it be better if you made your living off the open source project? Apparently not. If the project was proprietary from the start, there would be no complaints.
This hardliner stance basically means there is no continuum between proprietary software and open source software. That lack of continuum will mean that the vast majority of software will always be 100% proprietary.
Isn't Voron/Soval more open?
Voron isn't a company, nor are they after a profit, all designs are 100% opensource. Sovol runs on a profit and uses opensource designs to run their products.
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.
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.
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 its not open source. That's just shared cad files which mcmaster carr does.
would probably need some hybrid licensing. Like "if you buy a car you have license to print (or order a print) of up to X parts/years"
If you decide to get a Bambu anyway, let me heartily recommend against an H2D.
It did "just work" for a while, but then the print cooling fan went bad. On my home Voron, this would be a 5 minute fix. On the H2D, it is this [0]. You basically have to take the entire toolhead apart, removing the mainboard inside it with no less than 11 very tiny and fragile custom ribbon cables that connect to it, plus 5 more connections on a second board that goes on top of it. Most minor fixes are like this. Another time, I had to remove a stuck piece of filament, which involved taking apart the whole front of the toolhead and dealing with even smaller and more fragile flex PCBs.
[0] https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/h2/maintenance/replace-cooling-...
> On my home Voron,
You're not the target market for Bambu customers.
This is like complaining that on your dirt track racer it's a trivial process to swap the rear end spur and change final drive ratios. Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.
Maybe they should care a little, because the long-term repairability of their BMW or Bambu is going to put a real dent in their resale value. But they're not the ones dealing with tweezers and ZIF connectors and flex PCBs, so it's mostly just not their problem.
3D printers used to be exclusively the domain of people who enjoyed doing all this work themselves, who loved a well-designed machine that was a joy to work with like a Voron. That's no longer the case, Bambu is offering unrepairable black boxes that "just work" for enough time that some people can afford not to think care how it's made.
>Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.
We wouldn't really care either, but alas, there is no 3D printer dealership service center (unless you count 1 month round trip to ship it back).
I'd argue that my workplace who bought the H2D is exactly Bambu's target market. Most of us have personal printers we tinker with, but for work projects we need something that is mostly hit print and wait. We aren't really running a print farm, but we do a lot of iterations and make prototypes constantly. This is what the H2D was purchased for (specifically, the heated enclosure to better print ASA parts). Being hard to repair isn't really a problem, it's that it broke at all. And after it does break, changing a fan or clearing a jam should not be overhaul grade maintenance.
We also have a couple of P1Ss that are very solid, the one H2D has all the problems.
who actually is the target market though?
im not using a melted bead printer if care in any way about the quality of the result. resin printers are readily availble
the bmw owner is buying a better machine, or just paying somebody to do the printing for them
Sounds like RC quadcopters society -- everyone knows DJI, but they make fan guards a part of the frame. Guards and props are the most fragile parts, a consumable really. Something an enthusiast often carry spares for, to quickly swap on the field for any other RC quad, but with DJI you need what, send the whole frame to factory?
I have DJI drone, broke prop maybe once, replaced in few minutes. Prop guards work as intended.
I did once got it into iron sand which seized the motors. Luckily their insurance covered full replacement.
There are much worse things about them like subpar performance or shitty way to access the card slot in Avata, but otherwise they solid.
I mean prop guards -- what do you do when a prop guard breaks?
IDK what sort of guards you speak off but I don’t think it’s possible to do so on my avata. I did smash it pretty hard few times.
I like my H2D, but it definitely hit a brick wall. I replaced it, and had the same issue with one of the nozzles not printing consistently.
This was after around 700 hours, which isn’t terrible, but working with their support is exhausting. I don’t think I’m going to touch it again until winter, unfortunately.
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.
Any experiences printing ASA with it?
I got the V2 and same - no fuss, especially if I stick to Elegoo filament. Multicolour worked out of the box, to the point where it's difficult to think it was a Big Thing until recently.
Got the same printer, although I haven’t used it much it’s been pretty great for the price.
>They're an excellent company, and the complete opposite of Bambu when it comes to Openness.
not really -- but there ARE total open printers out there. voron and ratrig come to mind.
prusa decided to change a lot of ethics once they became 'big'.[0]
[0]: https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-prin...
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)?
Core1, add an INDX if you want multi tool (far more flexible and less waste than the AMS).
Thank you. Good tip. Okay, looks like what I'll want is a Core1+INDX+INBXX(w/dryer) to capture the P1S+AMS2 flow.
Given how I'm not sure there are 2D printers that really "just work" and don't throw opaque hard to track down errors at random - I actually like open 3D printers that do break, but you can be sure any issue is fixable & you will learn something new in the process. :)
I know it's popular to shit on 2D printers, but other than very often being very slow and running out of ink (or rubber rollers hardening after 20 years of use) - I actually didn't have any issues with them? But then I actually didn't really use them for 20 years either.
My main issues:
* one day remote printing no longer works, you need to set it up again or even get into prolonged debugging session
* remote printing works one ane device but not other
* one color toner cartridge on a color laser printer is empty or near empty, printer refuses to print without all manners of overrides on the local control panel, making it unusable for non-technical users
Well, the last point is basically sabotage by the manufacturer to make you buy more stuff, as it can print B/W perfectly fine or with slighly less quality until that one cartridge is replaced. But I guess that kinda proves my original point. :)
I stopped buying cartridge-based inkjets years ago. I'm happy with my Canon G3020, which uses ink tanks (built into the printer, not a third-party addon that the manufacturer will claim voids the warranty).
And it's impressive how long those ink tanks last: I printed out 400 pages of full color and the ink tanks went from 80% full to about 50% full. (There's a clear plastic window in front of the ink tanks, with a "refill when ink reaches this level" line on it — a raised line of plastic, not something inked or painted onto it that could rub off — so you can glance at the printer and see what level the ink is at). The ink bottles cost me about $12 each if I remember right, and each one will fill the ink tank from the "refill here" line to more than 100%: I had to stop filling, then wait until I had printed a few hundred more pages, then refill the rest. Rough back-of-the-envelope math says maybe 1200 pages from a full ink tank. The C, M, and Y bottles will cost $36 total (the K bottle will last a lot longer so I'm not counting it in this math), which means 3 cents a page for full-color, ink covering nearly the whole page, prints. Considering the cheapest print shop I've found would charge me 20 cents per page (and I've seen 50-cents-a-page quotes for full-color printing), the $200 printer will have already paid for itself by the time you run through one ink tank (17 cents saved times 1200 pages is $204).
This is turning into an ad for Canon, but seriously, it's a great printer. The only thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't do automatic duplex printing (I have to pull the pages out, flip them over, and put them back in), and I knew that when I bought it (the model that did automatic duplex was $450, and I chose not to buy that one). Oh, and I am not affiliated with Canon in any way: considering how glowing a review this is, I should probably say that explicitly.
But the best part for me was that it's not an Epson. I previously owned an Epson ink tank printer, and it was great... until the ink sponge filled up. Did you know that ink jet printers, at least the ink-tank variety, have a sponge inside them? When you do a "clean clogged print heads" routine, the printer moves the print head over to the position of the sponge, and pushes ink through the print heads until it's moved enough liquid to hopefully push the clog out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But the sponge can only absorb so much ink before it fills up. And on an Epson, the sponge is not a user-serviceable part. They want you to send it to one of their official repair shops to get it replaced, costing I don't know how much because I refused to do it. I found an unofficial way to wipe the printer's internal counter that kept track of how much ink was in the sponge... and when the printer died about a year later (for unrelated reasons), I went shopping for another brand. I'll never buy an Epson printer again. Canon, on the other hand, will sell you a "maintenance cartridge" (a large sponge mounted in a plastic tray of the right shape to slot into the printer) for about $10 plus shipping. When the sponge gets full you can just swap in a new one. Dead simple.
Enough gushing from me. The point that I spent way too long getting to is, ink-jet printers don't have to use cartridges. Ink-tank printers used to only be available in the Asia/Pacific market, but they're available in the US now. A couple years ago I helped my parents (in the US) buy a Canon G3020 and set it up for them. So far their experience has been positive, too.
Isn't this just a Bambu marketing point? I have a Prusa MK4S and a Centauri Carbon - they both print without any fuss and can be operated without any deep technical understanding.
Im not sure what problems people are even envisioning having. I got a diy Anet8 that was badly assembled by somebody else years ago that they gave to me for free. I tightened up some fittings and strapped down some loose wires and it still just works. If newer and supposedly better printers were more difficult I would consider them junk, in operation they aren't that complicated of machines. The most complicated thing I gotta do is usually change the print temp up or down 5 degrees for different company filaments.
Last time I checked you don’t have to pay that much more for a Prusa than a similar spec Bambu printer.
And in any case, Bambu’s well-publicized abuse of open source has driven me off of ever using their printers. I know that only nerds care about this, so I hope Prusa keeps pushing to build a straightforwardly better product.
I'm still rocking my Ender 3 Pro, I printed a part 13 hrs straight and it came out fine
not saying it can't be better eg. faster, multi-color/material but yeah works for me right now with Cura
I do the same.
Ender 3 V2 that I paid <$250 for about 5 years ago. It paid for itself on the first print job where I repaired some Samsung stove knobs where replacements were $400 a set.
I'm now considering an upgrade and I'll likely just go with the Ender 3 V3 Plus (bigger bed, auto leveling, still an offline printer) and < $450 for cost.
It's been a fantastic printer for me.
I use Cura, stick with standard settings, use Sun PLA+ for all my prints, and the only thing I really need to do is level the bed sometimes.
I upgraded from the 3 to the 5, and had some great experiences with it. My Ender 3 was such a Printer of Theseus; I think I'd replaced everything except the extruded aluminium frame by the time I upgraded.
But that's part of the hobby, surely? Like, just having a printer and having it print things first time, and never taking it apart or replacing chunks of it to see if that would work better, seems kinda dull to me ;)
Oh, and fuck Bambu. Never touching their shit.
Creality has printers that are straight-up clones of the Bambu printers and are just as easy to use, but they've historically been somewhat okay at working in the open source ecosystem, unlike Bambu.
Prusa is, of course, the gold standard, and their more recent printers are super easy to use, too.
what can bamboo actually do to lock this down?
are they making their own actuators that communicate with some encryption?
if i buy a bamboo and i dont like it, can i not just cut out all the electroincs and put whatever the new dev board of the day is and flash standard 3d printing firmware on it and send it through a calibration run?
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.
The "middle ground" is fairly split amongst different manufacturers like Creality, Anycubic, Elegoo, and even Anker now so it's hard for a popular one to emerge.
Having experienced both Prusa's prices (not just the machines, but also parts like nozzles and thermistors -- there's no way Prusa's thermistors should be twice as expensive as Bambu's) and Bambu's shenanigans, if I ever need a new printer, I'm very inclined to start my search with those smaller brands too.
Dusting off my HN credentials to plug Qidi.
If you can afford to pay more for less printer, get a Prusa Core One. I almost did, but at the time the cost would have included four months of waiting, and that was just too much.
But the Qidi Plus 4 has been just a beast for me. It had some growing pains, and the Internet is forever, so if you read up on it you'll see some scary-looking problems involving the heating element which have been completely fixed for more than a year. From everything I've been able to determine, the QC issues with the Plus 4 are over, and the newer printers like the Q2 and Max 4 have never had them.
I think the intersection of "reads HN" and "needs that tiny delta of convenience between Bambu and Qidi" is empty, basically. Qidi are good open source citizens, and you get a lot of bang for your buck, especially handling high-temp filaments. It's _possible_ to print nylon and ABS on Bambu hardware, but realistically you want something a little better.
Also they're cheaper than Bambu. Thought that was worth mentioning as well.
I'd seriously consider the Snapmaker U1 also, but not the K2 Plus. For one thing, Creality has had to be bullied several times to meet GPL obligations, and I don't like to reward that kind of behavior. For another, the Qidi Max4 is bigger, prints hotter, is more precise, and costs less. Pareto improvement on the K2 Plus.
I'm holding out on the Snapmaker because a) my Qidi Plus 4 is a great piece of hardware and at only 700 hours it's got a lot of life left in it, and b) The Prusa + Bondtech INDX is right around the corner. That's probably going to be my next printer. I find the waste and extreme slowness of AMS-style multimaterial too distasteful to invest in, and I think that entire paradigm will end up in the dustbin as tool-changing consumer FDM matures.
I'm mostly happy with my Qidi Plus 4. It's pretty much plug and play. They are sometimes a bit rough around the edges, but mostly good. I'd say don't buy the newest model at launch because they tend to beta test at the customer.
I’ve gotten some really good prints with a Qidi Q1 Pro. Have read good reviews about some of the other/newer versions by the same brand as well. They are very cheap for the features they have, and excellent quality
I have a Plus 4. It's usable but takes a lot of work to become decent, and needs a lot of maintenance.
Is it older than March 2025?
The first year was rough, from what I've read. Mine arrived March 2025, it has taken no work to print excellently, and at about 700 hours I have lubricated it every 200 hours, and I just tightened the belts about 50 hours ago. That's it. If it's less than $100 a roll I've probably printed it. I have no complaints.
I bought it in June 2025.
From what I've gathered across Discord servers (QIDI official, QIDI unifficial and Team 7 mostly), there is a decent percentage of machines that more or less just work, as has been your experience. For the less lucky ones, it's a lifetime of tinkering. I'm on the latter cohort, unfortunately.
Not to mention that out of the box you need to lock the printer in a cabinet as its printing. It used to give me headaches to be close to it for more than a couple minutes.
My P1P at my work is having wifi issues. I'm considering just getting a Core 1, mostly because it has an ethernet port.
Yeah I'm in the market for printer and this just reinforces I should just buy Bambu because literally everything else will be nightmare to use.
But FWIW I'll be transiting China in few months time so will be interesting to see what they sell there.
Chinese printers, like Chinese drones, Chinese PV equipment, and Chinese electric cars are inexpensive but that's because the Chinese Communist Party loves to pick winners.
They subsidise the living heck out of designated national champions, dump oceans of cheap product onto the international market, kill off international competitors, and then seize control of markets. It is neither legal, nor morally defensible.
Want a printer that happens to not be made in China? Good luck. Pay more, or knuckle under, and accept Chinese control of your technology, and increasingly, what you are allowed to say and think.
I don't think Prusa and Bambu compare well. Prusa printers aren't as cleanly designed as Bambu and they are more than twice the price. I consider them really poor value for money. And Bambu printers aren't clones. The AMS is something they came up with.
Also, Prusa copy from Bambu too. Like their own material switcher (much less sophisticated than the AMS) and the new Core printer is really more a Bambu copy than the other way around, honestly. In fact other brands are copying Bambu too.
I really like them, they are fair to me as a consumer. Spare parts are cheap, there's no consumable restrictions or subscriptions for their cloud service.
And they're really as plug and play as you can get right now. I don't really need that, I've owned printers since the first generation so I know how to deal with issues. But really they happen rarely. The worst I get is stuck filament in the AMS and I found I can prevent that by removing the bit of filament with gear bite marks after it's been through. It absorbs more water then and gets brittle.
Also I've learned from earlier printers not to mix materials in the same nozzle so I switch them too.
No idea about the filament swirchers, but calling core XY designs bambu clones is really funny.
The core XY design that all manufacturers are now centering around has been around long before Bambu existed as a company.
Core XY didn't exist in consumer printers outside of Vorons that took hours to build. If all a new company did was take an obvious concept and make it accessible, then that just reflects poorly on the previous market leaders.
The technical design maybe but they all look like bambu P1/X1 in terms of design.
I have about 15,000 hours on my Bambu x1c, and it's been fantastic. Their customer service has been great, too; the couple of times that I've had service issues, the tech genuinely worked with me to solve the problem. They were a lot nicer about it than the times I had to contact prusa about my older i3. FWIW.
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.
>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.
This is how you end up with overpriced "3D print cartridges", unfixable printers that fail at warranty + 1 day and control software that goes "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't print that."
> As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me
Are they actually still the best on price/performance? There are now dozens of Bambu clones at lower prices, I'm wondering how much worse those are (for example, a printer like the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2)?
Lower prices? I'm seeing the Carbon 2 priced 12% more than a P1S and 60% more than an A1. The base A1 goes for like 270€. I'm not sure if that's possible to undercut without losses if you sum up just the price of the hardware.
> I'm seeing the Carbon 2 priced 12% more than a P1S
Indeed, but if you add the AMS options to both, the P1S suddenly becomes a lot more expensive.
> The base A1 goes for like 270€
The A1 is in a different weight class, not being enclosed.
I just finished building a Core One+. It has a number of printed parts, but it also does have a bunch of injection molded ones, and they've just replaced another printed one with injection molding. Most of it is metal though, with the printed parts mostly used as relatively simple brackets to hold stuff in place that doesn't need great precision, and replacing those probably wouldn't save much on cost. I think these days they do the printed parts thing mostly to dogfood their print farm solution and I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation had only one or two printed parts for bragging rights. I wasn't a big fan of that either, the Mini I got in 2000 had a few critical parts printed and that did impact performance somewhat, but the Core One+ is fine in that regard.
From a hobbyist perspective, I find it's a much better designed machine than a friend's Bambu that recently broke down and turned out pretty much unfixable. Performance is at least on par, but the entire Prusa can be taken apart with basic hex and torx keys, it's highly serviceable and repairable, lots of fairly standard parts, not very highly integrated. I consider that a feature, but that will cause higher sourcing and assembly costs. It's built like a tank, lots of attention to detail, I expect it to last for a long time with minimal servicing.
That also means it's not targeting the same niche as Bambu's printers. That's not a personal insult, that's just a consequence of how things are right now. No European company is going to undercut a ultra high scale Chinese market dominiation vehicle, that's just not happening. Prusa is doing lots of R&D on much lower sales, they don't have the kind of access to Chinese industry that Bambu has, obviously the Bambu will be cheaper even if Prusa tried to compete in the same segment. But once the market domination thing is far enough along I expect Bambu will disallow non-chipped filament, lock everything into their cloud and jack up their prices. That's how these schemes usually end if they work out, but if they did that now, companies like Prusa would see record sales, so they don't do that just yet.
I'm pretty happy we still have some trace amounts of viable B2C tech industry in Europe. Companies like Prusa provide insane social value too by keeping skills and production in the EU. That's something we sorely need more of (not that companies are to blame, but we still do). Not sure how things will play out, and I'm not too optimistic, but perhaps with everyone else going all-in on dark patterns and pumping out disposable low cost crap, there is an emerging niche for reasonably open high-quality products that serve the owner first and don't data mine them for every last private detail.
Sure I'm certain that is the endgame for Bambu, but I'm also sure that people won't stand for it as long as there's any kind of competition (of which there's currently loads) and will move to the next best thing. They've come out of nowhere and captured the current gen, for the next one we'll probably see someone new.
I don't really buy the longevity angle for something that's moving so fast in terms of tech, my old Ender 3 lasted long enough to make itself obsolete in practically all aspects with practically zero maintenance. I had to junk a perfectly working machine because it became something not worth putting filament into. With such improvements each gen I'd rather have a cheaper machine that runs for a few years. Maybe we've already peaked but I seriously doubt it. I wouldn't be surprised if we see non planar antialiasing as stock at twice the speed and half the loudness, making what we use today once again become a waste of filament. Disposable low cost crap makes a whole lot more sense imo.
Remember the first gen Makerbots? Horrid overbuilt machines with glass beds, mandatory raft, quality barely worth a mention. They cost 5k and were obsolete in like two years tops. That's roughly how I see Pruša's approach as well.
If we actually valued local skills in the EU we'd have subsidies that make them competitive, ergo we do not. Personally I don't really see any for-profit surviving past going into the dark pattern hole eventually, there's too many incentives. Best just take what's best and least locked down today and run with it, assume it will vanish tomorrow. Forget long term support. Luckily there's always someone else willing to burn VC money in the initial market flood phase lmao.
This sentence in 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.
"We forced every user of every printer, worldwide, to interact with their printer through our centralized servers. This caused service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users."
There, I fixed it for you Bambu. You may use it under Creative Commons.
Seems like making the slicer only able to talk to the printer via the cloud was a bad way to do things, where any issue results in “instability felt by all users.”
It can talk to the printer directly if you use "LAN mode". This also work with 3rd party slicers like OrcaSlicer.
This is false. After the authorization-related firmware changes last year LAN mode doesn't allow 3rd party slicers to connect.
LAN mode is also abandonware with numerous issues and missing features that they've had no interest in fixing. Orca slicer has had to rely on hacky workarounds in Bambu's buggy networking plugin just to be able to connect to printers in a different subnet. https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/4512
> This is false. After the authorization-related firmware changes last year LAN mode doesn't allow 3rd party slicers to connect.
I can connect to my P2S in LAN mode with OrcaSlicer just fine (currently using the latest 2.4.0 nightly).
> be able to connect to printers in a different subnet
This is a separate issue, I think even Bambu Studio can't connect to printers in LAN mode on a different subnet.
> I can connect to my P2S in LAN mode with OrcaSlicer just fine (currently using the latest 2.4.0 nightly).
You either haven't updated the firmware or you also enabled "Developer mode" which has its own issues.
> This is a separate issue, I think even Bambu Studio can't connect to printers in LAN mode on a different subnet.
It's not a separate issue, it's a long-standing bug in their proprietary networking plugin that they refuse to fix. Orca slicer has implemented a hacky workaround so it actually works there.
So if my printer isn’t working because their network is down, it’ll swap to lan mode for a seamless experience? No? Huh.
They also seem to not know their nerdy customers, which means, fun times ahead :)
Do the well-behaving clients really need to use those servers? Could you have done something to avoid this bottleneck for all users?
Yeah, this is a farce.
So technically they just said that their printers would be less popular if Orcaslicer ceased to exist.
So am I understanding correctly that all of this "unauthorized traffic" was their customers...using their product?
So it would seem.
I guess if it's a security issue, it's a security issue: https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/10681
A conspiracy-theory steelmanning interpretation of that statement is that Bambu thinks that some unscrupulous Chinese manufacturer is performing DDoS attacks against them, but can't fully and publicly admit to that for legal reasons.
... and sending a cease and desist to OrcaSlicer somehow mitigates that DDoS?
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 have no issues with OrcaSlicer and interacting with my printers or starting prints remotely as long as I have LAN and Developer mode turned on. The only catch is that you need something like Tailscale set up for remote printers so you can access them over your "local" network. You can also get remote management/monitoring on your phone with apps like Openbu or Lanbu.
Why do you feel entitled to use their cloud services with 3rd party applications?
Setting aside that you're putting words in the other party's mouth, you're clearly entitled to do exactly that when the product is sold as having various functionality that depends on the cloud service. If you tell me my new toaster can send a live video of my bagel to my phone then I am entitled to receive that functionality without being subject to your shitware.
That is literally what they said:
> I can no longer use OrcaSlicer to interact with my printers (e.g. sync filaments) and start prints remotely.
The remote interaction with the printer goes via their cloud.
> If you tell me my new toaster can send a live video of my bagel to my phone then I am entitled to receive that functionality without being subject to your shitware.
No you aren't. You might be able to use 3rd party clients, but this is never a given. BambuLab owns their cloud servers, they can choose which clients they will allow to use them.
Well I guess we'll have to agree to disagree because we have a fundamental difference in our view here. If they advertised the printer as having certain functionality that relied on their cloud and if the printer was also advertised as working (with full functionality) with third party clients then they don't have the right to later try to block people from using those cloud services.
A SaaS company enjoys full control of their cloud servers and licenses use of their proprietary webapp to you. A hardware company sell a physical product that you own and is not morally allowed to yank functionality later. As far as I'm concerned their cloud servers are part of their product and that's a hill I'm willing to die on. Anything short of that is a blatant bait and switch.
I'd be willing to settle for them offering fully refunded returns to all affected customers who want it. Failing that I'd expect the court system to award appropriate damages. This sort of scenario is literally what consumer protection laws were created for.
Edit: I (and many others) might be operating under a misunderstanding? It looks like all (?) the advertised functionality might be available (at least for now) locally via MQTT. But I'm not entirely clear on that. https://github.com/Doridian/OpenBambuAPI/blob/main/mqtt.md
Why do you ask about something no one said?
The only way to put pressure on a company is to buy their competitor's product instead.
The company would prefer that you "put pressure" by getting angry, ranting on social media, and then still buying their product.
"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 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.
If I give you a template for a postcard, it doesn’t give you the right to send it with “signed, ricardobeat” at the end. These are orthogonal concerns.
They could very well enforce login for the entire app, that doesn’t require any closed source code and everyone would be worse off.
It does if you make the card self destruct if you don't write "signed, ricardobeat" on it. Courts have been over this in the 1990s with Nintendo. The Gameboy wouldn't boot any game that didn't start with "signed, Nintendo" so game companies just put that there and it wasn't illegal.
(Later, a trick was found to replace the signature and still boot, but it required extra chips in the game cartridge)
The part of the slicer connecting to their cloud IS closed source.
Which is itself a violation of the AGPL license by Bambu - if anyone deserves to get sued, they do.
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).
In general, I agree with you. However, to extend your analogy a bit further, so that it applies to _this_ situation: suppose you buy said house. When the former owner hands over the keys, you copy them. Then, one day, you enter the house using the copied key. The former owner can't really be all that upset, can they?
1. You bought the house. 2. They gave you a key, which implies that you have permission to use it. 3. Is the problem really the _copy_ of the key?
With no authentication it's a "gates down" scenario and it's assumed that if you put your server on the open internet you intend people to connect to it.
With authentication it's "gates up" and then "without authorization" from CFAA kicks in. I think it's unlikely that a user agent string creates a "gates up" situation, especially not if it's from code granted under a permissive license.
The law isn't some autistic computer system, "authentication" is a very broad and amorphous term.
If I build their slicer, not modifying any line of code, then accessed using that binary, would that be acceptable? If not, why not, considering it is identical to what is on their website?
If I made any changes prior to building, would it still be acceptable? And if not, where is the line? What is the legal basis, any precedent? How much of the code may I modify before I cross an invisible threshold and somehow "bypass" an "authentication" (neither fit UA anyways, either for law or other purposes unless one can provide any evidence that it ever has).
Even if that’s correct, Bambu has a right to then press charges on the users, but can’t really complain about the guy simply copying AGPL software to make it work. He’s not the one doing the illegal part.
Bambu clearly didn’t want to press charges on their users, though, so they weaponized the law to try and prevent this, and it’s causing them issues.
In any case, we’re not in some “only the laws matter” reality, we’re also have ethics and morals to consider, in which case Bambu is clearly in the wrong. If they want to secure their servers, they should do it properly rather than using legal threats.
"Press charges" - as if this were some Simple Assault. The CFAA isn't something one "chooses" to levy or not, these are crimes against the United States of America and it is solely up to the discretion of a US Attorney to prosecute.
A US Attorney prosecuting anyone on behalf of Chinese business interests isn't a good look politically, though, and that's often a factor.
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.
I checked and in that case [0] specifically, the court specifically doubted that such access was violating any applicable laws. Course, it got vacated before that could be properly addressed and this seems to be specific to NJ so if someone knows a broader case, happy to read up, but to me this makes the argument stronger that there is no reason to just presume such a "bypass" (if that counts, many of us have "bypassed" a lot via reading robots.txt, etc. in our youth) is inherently illegal. Again, happy to read if someone can provide a source saying something else. If Bambu want to argue EULA, go ahead, but let us not give these entities the ability to just wish something illegal because they simply dislike it, when there is no evidence it is.
Am currently somewhat into the topic of UAs for a personal project (not connected to Bambu printers), so am honestly interested for any tangible information, I just dislike us assuming something illegal because a corporate entity views it in a negative light.
[0] https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/131816p.pdf ("We also note that in order to be guilty of accessing “without authorization, or in excess of authorization” under New Jersey law, the Government needed to prove that Auernheimer or Spitler circumvented a code- or password-based barrier to access. See State v. Riley, 988 A.2d 1252, 1267 (N.J. Super. Ct. Law Div. 2009). Although we need not resolve whether Auernheimer’s conduct involved such a breach, no evidence was advanced at trial that the account slurper ever breached any password gate or other code-based barrier. The account slurper simply accessed the publicly facing portion of the login screen and scraped information that AT&T unintentionally published.")
There was more than one court involved. He was convicted. Then he appealed and the appeals court vacated the conviction. So from one perspective, "the law" as a whole decided that he wasn't guilty. From another perspective, he still got involuntary lodging courtesy of the state.
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) and Bambu is not happy.
Edit: On re-reading, it seems to me the fork is still calling Bambu's servers. It's just bypassing some things.
You must put authorization on your server if you don't want others connecting to it.
While the right of access is not granted by AGPL - it is not reasonable to run a public service with an AGPL client and say you shouldn't be connecting to it.
They are doing a lot of work to create implied consent under CFAA.
If you want to control access you must do something to control access - it must reach a threshold, it cannot just be a public user agent string.
> You must put authorization on your server if you don't want others connecting to it.
Unfortunately, the CFAA doesn't necessarily require that authorization is implemented through technical means, and it definitely doesn't require any authorization to be technically robust.
The point is that they distributed AGPL licensed software which legally speaking puts them on very thin ice if they say "actually you're not allowed to modify that software we gave you and explicitly told you you could modify to do whatever you want."
This is a direct quote from the Affero GPL:
> When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.
The thing Bambu is doing is very much against the spirit of the AGPL, which is the license they chose for the Bambu printer software. And the AGPL has such broadly written language it's hard to believe what they are doing complies with the letter.
Again, legally that's correct. But it goes completely against the spirit of open source and especially the GPL which says in the license itself that "our General Public Licenses are intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program". If you can't run a modified version of a program without getting sued, you practically speaking do not have the freedom to modify it.
Elsewhere, the GNU explains why this is important[1]:
> With proprietary software, the program controls the users, and some other entity (the developer or “owner”) controls the program. So the proprietary program gives its developer power over its users. That is unjust in itself; moreover, it tempts the developer to mistreat the users in other ways.
> [...]
> Freedom means having control over your own life. If you use a program to carry out activities in your life, your freedom depends on your having control over the program. You deserve to have control over the programs you use, and all the more so when you use them for something important in your life.
Telling your users they can't run modified versions of your open source client goes against this principle.
Again, I'm not necessarily saying Bambu isn't within their legal rights to do this, I'm just saying it's a jerk move.
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
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.
And they report service disruptions as a result of this - so perhaps they are are also learning what gateways are.
Blaming the CLIENT for this is absolutely crazy.
"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
I am an outsider on the details of the Bambu software requiring users to go through their servers in China and the closing of their software.
Still I suspect it is about spying in wartime, Bambu printers are at the core of the Ukrainian war effort, the main reason even Ukraine is winning since januari 2026.
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.
There is no requirement to send prints through their servers. My P1S has never been logged into their cloud service in the year I've owned it.
Yeah. I just bought a new p1s last week and today hooked it up, never connected it to anything but power. Printing from the SD card worked first try, zero issues.
...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...
> 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.
What you write sounds like an invitation to pro-Russia-minded people to sabotage these free Bambu firmware efforts. :-)
Please provide sources to your claims.
Kill switch in DJI drones and other brands: https://npo.nl/start/serie/konvooi/afleveringen/seizoen-1
Documentairy in Dutch but the interview is in English
Geoblocked in USA. HTTP 451 in network requests.
Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtt9eST5H80
the kill switch is discussed in part 2 https://youtu.be/za62IvbfzXE?t=1061 by the fire department who got the drone donated by the interviewer from "Protrct Ukraine"
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-...
1) I have heard of the kill switches being used from several sources in the Ukraine ministry of defense. I advised them on how to remove the kill switches in two brands.
2) It was mentioned in an interview of military in this Dutch documentary https://npo.nl/start/serie/konvooi/afleveringen/seizoen-1
3) Several journalists mentioned it in their news reporting (sorry, I can't locate the links right now).
4) Two soldiers vlogged about it on youtube.
> 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.
I have informed a few 3D printer operators on how to do it themselves. But it is hard for these soldiers, they have other priorities.
It is not 'standing in their way', it is revealing the secret locations where the Ukranians drones are manufactured. Several of these factories where discovered and Russia bombed them.
So Ukraine is on the verge to becoming western world supplier of top end drones and 3d printers and we are doing exactly nothing about it?
IMO Ukraine should start exporting their drones (for fun or spooking political adversaries) as a way to help the war effort.
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.
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.
In practice Ukrainians have long moved to custom built drones for pretty much everything.
Picking up 3D printers that don't spy on you, modding them or even building custom ones is much easier than designing and building millions of custom drones, so I am sure they solved this long ago.
Like, really - a FDM printer is just a MCU board with a bunch of stepper drivers, a power supply, some frame, motors, thermistors & heating elements.
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.
As far as I can tell, they're just objecting to use of their cloud service. You can fork their software and use it with your own printer just fine, they just don't want you to use it with their cloud service, which its own terms of service for access.
I think it's an odd hill for them to die on, but it's not a totally unreasonable position - the cloud is other people's computers, other people can have rules about what you can do with their computers. Just because a client is open-source, doesn't mean you're allowed to use the server.
If you're using developer mode running everything locally (or remotely over your own VPN, like the author here) then I think this makes zero difference.
They're objecting to use of their cloud service, and they're also disabling local-only mode thus forcing use of their cloud service, and their software is required to be AGPL (because that's how they themselves received it) so they're required to allow you to clone it and modify it but they just don't want you to.
It's "I would like to take this free software so I don't have to write it, oh and by the way I want to make everyone dependent on me now for enshittification reasons, so kindly fuck off and let me use this software just by myself. I take, you no take. Understand?"
Are they disabling local mode? There's no mention of that here - the post by Bambú actually specifically promotes it.
It's already gone. This whole issue kicked off in January 2025: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/qwL63 - your only options were to stay on older firmware (and even then, the T&C's are sketchy, it worries owners there's no guarantee Bambu won't change their mind) or, if you upgrade, you push everything through Bambu's cloud services forevermore, and no backsies. Only a handful of operations can then be done by directly talking to the device, from that point on it only speaks to its real owner, Bambu.
Bambu's blog mentions LAN Mode. What they fail to mention is that LAN Mode still requires their cloud service for authentication, i.e. they get to cut you off any time they want. They also removed the ability for third party software to talk directly to the printer, it instead has to go through their closed-source "Bambu Connect" handler running on the same computer, with very limited functionality, and only if Bambu Connect chooses to pass on the message.
Before: user can print via cloud or locally with custom slicer at the same time easier.
Some time in 2025: firmware updates make user choose between cloud XOR locally. Enabling local mode allows using custom slicer, but disables cloud printing or monitoring. Folks were up in arms because they wanted both, and openness.
Latest fork: a specific new custom slicer impersonates UA to submit print via bambu cloud, so it gives the pre-2025 experience.
Bambu sues this new fork. Actual OrcaSlicer working locally is fine.
Bambu didn’t sue, they sent a cease and desist letter. Just to be pedantic.
I don’t know what the fuss is about. This whole issue has nothing to do with the open source ecosystem.
It has everything to do with the part where Bambu does not authorize 3rd party programs to contact their cloud servers.
I totally agree that Bambu has their head up their ass here, but still, it’s not an issue that would make me want to choose another inferior or more difficult to use printer at this time.
I own a Bambu printer precisely because it’s the iPhone of printers. It’s a tradeoff.
If it ever enshittifies to the point of becoming a paperweight I’m personally not that worried about it. I paid under $300 multiple years ago for this printer. I know that’s not nothing and I don’t want to be wasteful but it’s not something I’ll be particularly upset about. It’ll be Bambu’s loss when I don’t buy their next products or when I stop buying their replacement parts and filament.
I'm in a similar boat to you. I understand the current drama, but for my intended use case (an occasional-use tool sitting on a workbench in my garage) LAN mode has been fine and entirely removed from the drama.
I don't want an open source slicer sending prints through their cloud services, because I don't want their cloud services. The value of being able to check on a print or start it from my phone is near-zero. I shoot it off a laptop in my office and check on it intermittently during the print from that same laptop. This has worked fine to-date on my machine, but the concern is clearly that Bambu's corporate interest is not in that use-case, it's getting as much of the ecosystem in-house as possible. They want to control the model side via markerworld, and have everything flow through the cloud.
One doesn't need to assume bad intent, there's pretty clear financial and UX incentives here that mirror a lot of Apple for example. But I don't think I'm out of line for not wanting to move towards that world under a company with Chinese ownership and in an environment where many western lawmakers are pushing for strict control of what the machines can be used for. It's a lot easier to implement DRM, copyright protections, and restrictions on what can be printed in a cloud-only world than one where open source software is sending gcode to a local printer.
I've got no need or intent to replace my machine, but the next one likely won't be a bambu. They're not the only ones who are now making a machine where it works as a tool and you don't need to have 3d printing be your hobby to be productive with it.
My understanding is that you got your printer when the firmware was not blocking you from doing all of that. Right now if you want to remote print (and don't want to do it via sending models to Bambu Cloud), you can get away if you enable LAN only and developer mode. However, what if the newer firmware forces you to create an online account and connect to Bambu cloud to do the setup? What if Bambu decides to limit the features you can use if you print using a SD card? It has been quite a worrying trend, and now the company is trying to legally threaten an open-source developer building on top of Bambu's AGPL code trying to make remote print without going through Bambu servers possible. Other ppl more knowledgeable on the issue, please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the situation.
> 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
Why do you have to do that on a product you own that is running in your home?
Because you should never fully trust any IoT product that you don't truly have control over. There's nothing stopping a faulty or malicious update from being pushed out, or their update servers being compromised (see notepad++ recently). So why increase your risk, if you don't truly need it online?
You're missing the point of what I'm saying: You shouldn't have to change settings to know that all your prints are not being sent to a remote party.
Networking filtering as an additional measure - sure. But it shouldn't be required to get sensible behaviour
Because (like every IoT product) Bambu want to sell a product with an easy app-powered workflow, and LAN device discovery and remote-access for home devices from mobile apps is flaky and terrible.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're slurping telemetry en route, and it's convenient for them that using their app helps nudge you towards Makerworld (their ecosystem for 3d prints, which is presumably good marketing) but I very strongly suspect "make it effortless for non-technical users to use the device with just a phone" was the original & primary driver.
Not to mention the fact that some people think of WiFi and cellular data as "things that give me access to the internet". The understanding of what a private IP address is and why it can't be reached from a cellular connection is just not there.
Others want to control their IoT when they're not at home or not in WiFi range (they may not even notice the latter). You can do it with a VPN, or perhaps port forwarding if you're lucky enough to have access to your router and no carrier-grade NAT, but that's even harder to set up.
3d printer users are more sophisticated than most, but I can imagine some artsy types owning them, as well as the kind of people who are very comfortable with a drill, soldering iron and a jackhammer, but who treat a computer as "that God-damned machine I need to use to buy the parts I need."
I've tried to download a model from MakerWorld and it told me I need to create an account first. That told me what I needed to know about that service & was not really surprising from Bambulab.
Well you are still supporting a company that is turning out to be objectively more and more evil & need to do crazy stuff that would be insanity for any other 3D printer ("block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry").
That automatically disqualifies Bambulab from my PoV.
You're obviously not an open source advocate or zealot if you gave up your principles so easily.
They don’t perceive that their principles are being violated. They asked nicely for a general explanation. How about giving them an equally nice answer in return instead of issuing a combative condemnation of their character?
Did you install the network connector Orca slicer prompted you to download? It's a closed source blob that runs on your PC which I'm presuming you haven't air-gapped as well.
TBF this was the case prior to the firmware change. It wasn't a bait and switch. It just wasn't obvious to someone buying a printer they thought worked with open source slicers.
I did not install any network connector in Orca Slicer.
Can you freely download firmware and update the printer offline?
> I'm not sure I'm clear on what the kerfuffle is about.
Perhaps the kerfuffle is about making legal threats against open source developers.
People just want to bitch online about printers not being open enough while they type their comments from their fully closed and locked down phones.
Are you under the impression that people aren't also upset about the phone thing?
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 find it doubly ironic since their own fork caused Bambu users' telemetry to hit Prusa's servers back in 2022, and (to my knowledge) Prusa didn't snap back with a C&D.
This for me was the most telling.
I bought a Bambu Labs A1 Mini. It cost $199, on sale. I plugged it in and started printing excellent prints.
Previously I bought an Ender printer for around the same amount. Never did get it to work. I'm not an engineer or a mechanic. I have other technical hobbies, astronomy for example. I tried making a telescope mirror with results similar to the Ender printer. I buy ready made telescopes, not telescope kits.
I have immense admiration for those who can and will make telescopes and 3D printers. I'm very interested in the base technology. But when I want to print something, or look at a faint fuzzy, I just want the system to work.
(Interestingly, I actually like star hopping, the process of finding an observation target with a finder scope and star charts. Go to telescopes have no interest for me. Go figure ...)
To me this seems like a failure of the U.S. corporate/economic system. We should be able to make a 3D printer that simply works. We should be able to make a drones that work as well as the DJI drones. (My understanding is that Bambu Labs was started by a group of former DJI engineers.).
I don't have any solutions here. Not buying a Bambu Labs printer means I don't get to print things in 3D. I would pay more, but whenever I look into the various alternatives that I'm assured are turnkey, they turn out to not be turnkey. And if my Bambu printer breaks I can generally buy a new one cheaper than paying someone who knows what they are doing to fix it.
I'll admit this kind of offends my geek sensibilities. I actually agree, at least emotionally, with Geerling. But I also agree that the U.S. military industrial complex should be able to make excellent consumer facing 3D printers.
If I were doing commerce with the 3D printer I almost certainly would be using something else. Maybe. For what its worth, I'm basically printing out puppet mechanisms and art figures. Occasionally a wall hook or missing part for something that I happen on a STL file for.
Prusa wrote an article about that:
https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...
In short, these Chinese companies are pushed by the state, in essentially massive dumping. And not only that, they get Chinese hardware patents granted on open inventions from the wider 3D printing community as their own creation & then try to push those spurious patents also in the West.
Great points. Using their printer "rooted" or with custom firmware seems like a decent compromise to me, kind of like what graphene is doing with pixels
If I had an actual need that wasn't being met, I might buy one of their printers just to root and run with custom firmware. I might just do it for the fun of it. Even with tariffs their printers are only running around $220 at Best Buy.
However, even that sounds suspiciously like a project in and of itself. I haven't had time to design and print anything in the last month. So I expect I'll keep rolling along like I am. Things could always change, though.
> Louis Rossmann posted a video saying he'd pledge $10,000 to help the open source dev fight Bambu's legal threats. And I'd happily chip in too, but that's only useful if the dev wants to put himself back in Bambu's crosshairs.
Louis Rossmann has decided to put himself in the crosshairs instead, with a video goading Bambu: https://youtu.be/1jhRqgHxEP8?si=BwfoCKxujd0XwNJ0
Here's what I don't get. How is infra load any different between someone using their slicer build, and someone using their code in another slicer (or a fork)? It's still (ultimately) the same human making the same requests. If they can't handle the load then the solution is to obviously carefully manage the supply of the printers, if your infra is incapable of handling more than 3 users (accurate figure going by the tone of their blog post), then don't have more than 3 of your printers in the wild at any single time. Problem solved.
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.
They had that chance to create proper auth and api for years and many developers and myself have been asking for it. Never happened, and I suspect will never happen.
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.
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.
From the AGPL:
>When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.
This doesn't apply because their cloud service, which has the "technological measure" is not the "covered work", as incompetent as the measure might be...
That's copyright circumvention not CFAA authorization circumvention
Even with a user agreement I think they need to gate their service behind that agreement, otherwise the agreement is optional and open ports are open for use.
You still need to form a valid contract - no notice, no assent, no contract.
If there's a gate that's being bypassed then this all changes but it doesn't seem like there is - and it doesn't seem like they can add one without breaking existing printers.
In this case, you're signing up for an account and entering into the user agreement to do so. There's a whole separate legal discussion to be had about the whole "scroll past it all and just click accept to make it to away" thing...
Another way to read it is that they are shifting blame away from their backend - which is so shitty that it experiences notable service disruptions when some of their existing users send unexpected headers - onto the client software.
There is a Bambu p1s on its way to me. I will exclusively print ASA and my impression was that the p1s has a good track record with ASA. My prints will be mounted in glider cockpits and require the UV resistance.
Money is a bit tight, so I decided against prusa as my first printer.
I am curious if anyone has good experiences with alternatives for the p1s with regards to ASA printing?
Yeah .. nah. Bang for the buck the Bambu mashines are just really good. And X2D even has a heated chamber. If you don't have the cash for a Prusa, but want similar levels of "just works"™ there sadly are not many options.
I mean I print ASA with my Voron, but that is build it yourself and high level of tinkering.
There are alternatives like QIDI Q2. But .. it will probably not be as fire and forget as Prusa or Bambu.
It's by far not the only Chinese 3D printer manufacturer that completely disregards open-source licenses. There's also Anycubic Slicer Next, which is essentially a reskinned OrcaSlicer with additional presets for Anycubic printers, yet you won't find its source code anywhere, not even if you request it via email.
I don't care if my 3d printer is "open" any more than I care if my refrigerator is "open". I get that for a lot of you it's a hobby that you want a dedicate a lot of time to, upgrading, hacking, etc.. which is great. But for me, I just want something that prints when I need it to print. The fewer minutes per month that I have to spend thinking about or interacting with my 3d printer, while still getting great prints, the better. And that is what Bambu has nailed better than anyone else, as far as I'm aware.
Your fridge became dependent on updates. Then they added ads to front panel. Then they'll say that you need a subscription to use holiday mode. Then it no longer receives update and touch panel stops working because it can't connect to servers and you'll need to buy a new one or buy an upgraded touch panel for $99 instead of $199 if you'll buy it this week.
Well, I too, don't have anything against a company selling a "good but not open printer", and I don't care if my fridge is open.
However, I hope you see that the behavior reported by Jeff here is just bad. They are either not understanding open source licenses or are acting in bad faith.
The issue is not that they sell 3d printers with proprietary software. The issue is altering the deal _after_ you have purchased the printer. People bought a printer that was open. Then suddenly the company changed their mind and pushed an update that made it non open. And when people try to restore the software to the state it was when bought, the company fights such attempts with dmca requests. If I bought something it's mine and I can do whatever I want with it and run whatever software I want on it.
Yeah this practice needs to end. You buy a stack of hardware+software that does X.
Imagine if pizza consisted of software and hardware and you only bought hardware but software could be changed by dev/seller. Now your pizza shrunk in size, changed taste, or could only be eaten by a fork that is supplied for free by the pizzashop, otherwise special chemical compounds would make it disintegrate if you'd try to eat it using your hands or anything else. Technically you still have that pizza you bought...
Then you sound like the type of client that perfectly fits Bambu's profile. Now, don't come complaining when Bambu decides you need a monthly subscription to use the slicer, or whatever rent-seeking they come up with in the future. Remember, you are paying extra for the privilege of not thinking, and you bought into that arrangement fully aware.
>I don't care if my 3d printer is "open"
Yet! Enshittification is a given, even if not premeditated. Finding open solutions now is proper planning.
I don't want my refrigerator or my table saw to require a server connection to China either, though.
If there were no 'open' 3D printers there would be no Bambu Lab.
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.
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.
There are many valid criticisms one can make about Bambu Lab, but the constant overreactions to everything they do is so tiring. Somebody at their company saw a fork with their own company name on it, impersonating their own client auth code, and sent a C&D.
The receiver of the C&D should see a lawyer about what changes or user-facing messages might get Bambu to back off. This is a normal, solvable business disagreement, not an excuse for everyone to get their pitchforks out again.
Also: I run multiple Bambu printers offline and they all work fine via sneakernet without anyone's files going anywhere. People should stop acting like these devices are bricks when used without internet access.
> Somebody at their company saw a fork with their own company name on it, impersonating their own client auth code, and sent a C&D.
I would doubt this is the case, Orca Slicer exists since 2022 and is very popular. This is not a "somebody just noticed a thing" situation.
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?
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.
> 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.
Bambu has the slicer (orca, bambu) download a plugin (owned and written by bambu, closed source.) which is what the controversy is about.
Orcaslicer is a perfectly legal fork, and in the past downloaded the official (closed source) binary blob to talk to the servers.
Bambu doesn’t want to serve people who reverse engineer the new (again, closed source) binary blob.
All of this being about the AGPL is just disingenuous ragebaiting.
One aspect of this may be Chinese laws, which I am assuming if they don't already require the ability to monitor or even censor what gets printed, they will soon. Even in the US we are starting to have legislation related to blocking firearm component printing, but this doesn't necessarily mean central servers do it or have access to everything printed. Yet.
I think the primary problem is actually more than just Bambu's behavior, it's that China is an authoritarian country, and most of the population not only accepts the idea of central servers monitoring and "moderating" behavior but largely may embrace it as a sensible thing to do. It's probably beyond Stockholm Syndrome to the point of much of the culture genuinely not completely even understanding the idea of why privacy and personal control is important.
Much of the United States is so far on the other side that they can't begin to understand the position Bambu is in. Large companies in that country just do not have the option to allow their users to bypass censorship and monitoring.
I do think it's actually great that this type of issue gets in everyone's face though and it's great people are fighting back. But realize that the problem is deeper than one company. It's the whole type of government and attitude towards it and technology.
They are sonosing it. Their online-first shift is them doing the same thing that Sonos pulled.
Which degraded their hardware usability so much, that it's literally much worse than a decade ago. Even basic functions like choosing which speaker should play or ... what content to play does not work properly.
Just another company to avoid by now.
I remember people dumping on Prusa for him complaining about Bambu Lab, pointing out all the mistakes he made, instead of seeing how he was right.
He was right.
Here is my perspective as someone who has not started 3d-printing yet, but is interested to give it a try:
I'm a confused about the whole "3D printer sends prints to its manufacturer's server" issue. Because I wouldn't want to connect hardware device like a 3D-printer to a network in the first place.
Can I buy a Bambu Lab printer and just never hook it up to any network?
Will I be able to print from sd-card just fine?
Can I update the firmware from an sd-card?
If these two are possible, I would not have any problems with such a device. If they are not, I would not even think about getting such a device.
And when it comes to slicing software: Can I use any slicing software and all I have to do is load the hardware info of the Bambu Lab printer I want to use? Or do I have to use Bambu Lab Studio or a fork like Orca Slicer for some reason?
And while we are at it: Does command line slicing software exist? I wouldn't want to dabble with a GUI. I would want to define the parameters of a print job in a yaml or json file and then slice it like "./slice.sh config.yaml myobject.stl"
You hook it up to the network to use monitoring features like a remote camera view to make sure your print is going smoothly.
SD cards work but it's extremely less convenient than just printing straight from the slicer.
You can use any slicer you want but Bambu wants only their slicer to directly connect.
CLI slicing is not something you want in general. Visual confirmation of the toolpaths is very important to making prints as successful as possible.
> You can use any slicer you want but Bambu > wants only their slicer to directly connect.
Here it looks like you can connect Orca?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMtkIGf8xOs&t=240s
I'll play devil's advocate. What is Bambu Lab's motivation to provide lifetime free cloud services for a onetime revenue transaction? They could demand a subscription. But they probably know for casual users this would be unwelcome. They could seek to monetize via other means like ads or cross and up-sell. Third party clients are a risk to these.
I don't see the ground the OSS community are standing on to demand Bambu provide free services.
If they don't want to provide free cloud services in perpetuity they could make their 3D printers work offline without restrictions.
They do, its called developer mode.
OK - so Bambu has harassed legitimate F/OSS projects.
Serious question: why not just release whatever you want but not tie it to your identity? Bambu demands OcraSlicer make changes under threat of litigation? OK, cool. Enjoy the 5,000 forks of OcraSlicer that implement that functionality in exactly the same way. Hell, post a notice that they were compelled to remove the feature, and that they're thereform removing the release x.y.z, with the sha256 hash of "...".
Now OrcaSlicer has complied, and the community has an semi-official way to make sure that the commits that were removed aren't modified when they get them from other sources.
Why should people be forced to distance themselves from their public service work in order to be safe from abuse?
Another aspect is that releasing something under copyleft without putting an identity behind it is toothless. Someone can copy it and now if you want to go after them, you need to out yourself anyway.
Playing devil's advocate, but Bambu had the writing on the wall for this kind of stuff for years.
You buy this, you "vote" for this.
The open alternative exists. It costed more, but I saved a bit more and got it.
Vote with your wallet, where and while you can.
Related post from GamersNexus:
https://gamersnexus.net/fk-you-bambu-lab
I'm with Jeff here and I basically had the same journey: My X1C is still going strong, running in developer mode but I'm not gonna throw it out the window. I won't gonna buy another product from Bambu Lab, ever again, tho.
New product launches by them feel less exiting (I don't want/need laser engraving capabilities in my 3D printer) and I agree with other commenters that these days, there are good alternatives. Unfortunately I have to say that wasn't around the time I bought the printer. When you just wanted to print things without making 3D printing a hobby, their machines were a no-brainer!
But yeah, bye bye Bambu Lab.
Only thing that's more annoying than their blog posts trying to "set things straight" is the "we told you so" crowd.
> every file you print goes through Bambu's servers
The Chinese government subsidizes Bambu Labs, so it's pretty easy to understand why this is such a big deal for them. It's not like the CCP wants to democratize manufacturing. They want the data.
IDK anything about 3d printing, but is their online service so complicated that people can't create an open source self hosted alternative? If they can already take the LAN version and send spoofed requests to their servers, they can do the same to a new fully open server.
Surely people can check the traffic and build a server to answer similarly, no? Or is this much more than job management?
Maybe this is impossible and I'm talking out of my ass, but for me it seems like a perfect opportunity to completely remove the problematic party from the equation.
The printer firmware is proprietary, cannot be easily changed anymore, and does certificate pinning for the cloud functionality. LAN mode does not expose the same functionality as the cloud.
I learned this less the hard way (and probably for the tenth time) with Anker.
I love their 3d printer. It "just works" like none I had before it.
But now they've killed their 3d printer business and all their stuff is absolutely dependent on their web services. So that thing is up shit creek without a paddle whenever they flip that switch.
It really hurts to think about replacing an expensive, WORKING thing just because it became abandonware.
> they can see everything you ever print on your printer
This will be the only legal way to own a 3D printer if WA HB 2320 or CA AB 2047 are passed. If you don't like it, call your representatives immediately.
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 ?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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'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)
Prusa: Probably less reliable/weaker UX, but good enough. Raise3D: Similar reliability, but more expensive.
Prusa, but it's more expensive.
I wish they weren't privacy invading, and abusing open source, but I love how good the printers are. I want to print practical things, not continually fix design flaws in the printer (as was the case with the Creality Ender).
Exactly for that reason I bought a Kobra X. I know that I have to go an extra mile but I am so fed up with vendor lock-ins.
I have owned a X1C for 3 months, returned it, and built a DIY LDO Voron Trident, full owenrship, 100% local.
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
Same! I was burned by Chamberlain, twice. In my case I had bought a $40 retrofit device (it connected to the MyQ cloud and simply used RF to emulate a remote to open any brand of opener).
First, there was their debacle where they broke HA connectivity just for fun, meaning I couldn't use HA or Apple HomeKit anymore. Then, after a pretty routine reset of the opener (I needed to clear out some old remotes and re-learn them) I found that in some recent update of the 'app' or whatever, they'd deleted my brand of opener from their supported list, due to some IP dispute of some kind, leaving it unable to learn the same remote it had learned the year before. So, as peeved as I had been to have to use their ad-laden app, the myQ device itself was completely useless to me.
Never again.
Irony is I just moved to a house with a brand new MyQ cloud-connected door. I bought a RatGDO anyway and will never buy any of the devices in the myQ ecosystem, even though some look attractive. Closed system on purpose = never buy.
Which garage door opener brands / models would you recommend?
Though I'm not OP, I will say that it seems like there are two brands that mostly have the market cornered.
Chamberlain/Liftmaster/MyQ is all the same company; they are a gross company that hates the idea of giving you control over your device. Zero LAN control story, Zero Homekit story, zero Home Assistant and no possibility of any of these.
Genie - whose "app" thing is called Aladdin Connect is the other one. There is a HA integration[1] for it, though it's cloud-dependent, no LAN story so again your ability to control it is subject the company's cloud servers being available, and to any future whim they may have. The Github for the plugin has issues reported, but no idea how widespread they are.
Looking at places like Home Depot it seems there's a brand called SkyLink[2] but it seems cheap in the bad way, and while it has its own "app" there seems to be no HA story whatsoever, so I assume kinda the worst of all.
Deeply uncomfortably, I would have to grudgingly acknowledge the practicality of buying from the gross Chamberlain, never using its MyQ BS, and connecting a RatGDO to it instead, which would give the best experience, even though giving them any business deeply offends me.
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/aladdin_connect/
[2] https://www.homedepot.com/p/SkyLink-Side-Wall-Mount-Quiet-Ga...
> no possibility of any of these.
Except, you know, a UART?
https://ratcloud.llc/
Please read my comment again - I mentioned RatGDO and literally own one. My point was that there's no possibility Chamberlain would ever give you any of these things in the built-in Wi-Fi-connected hardware you've already paid them for.
It is unfortunate to reward those weasels for their bad behavior by buying their device, even if one substitutes their own "brain" and never uses MyQ. But yeah, that may be the only practical option.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Pretty much. It's so blatant obvious severe security risk for anyone who is not perceiving computers as black box magic device.
What about Elegoo Centauri Carbon? I've had my eye on this for some time.
I bought one a few months back when it was weirdly cheap (£260 delivered!) and it's been really very solid. I've only had a couple of issues:
1. One of the bed temperature sensors reported a fault, this was a loose connection and took about 10 minutes to open and reseat, which was nice
2. I sometimes get an error in Chinese that blocks a print and requires pressing a continue button on the touchscreen. I've tried translating this and I have no idea what it's on about, so if anyone does know what it is then lemme know. Doesn't cause me much trouble though
Overall I'm really pleased with it - it's pretty much a bargain. Mine has never been connected to the internet and very rarely has print failures (and they're nearly all my fault when I have had them). I've ordered the multi-filament addon which they've just announced, and I was pleased to see them offer that as an upgrade for purchasers of the first model.
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.
Yeah i got a CC1 due to price alone (Prusa was out of my range but obviously vastly preferred), and then they started trying to pull bullshit with firmware. They backed off after outrage, but don't forget that this is exactly what Bambu initially tried to do - so it will be the first and last Elegoo that I purchase.
Printer is great though. I've never used a Bambu, but after a thorough round of Orca calibration this (at the time) newbie was able to get some really decent PCTG and even PA-CF prints.
Web interface can't hold a stable video stream.
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.
Apple is building things in house and closed source. They also don't throw their weight around with small developers like this.
This article isn't about the fact that Bambu has a walled garden. They're slandering and suing an OSS developer for using open source code that Bambu published. And the reason Bambu publishes open source code is because they're heavily reliant on the open source community.
I agree their printers are good, and good printers help the market, but this behavior is unconsciounable and needs to have consequences.
I can't speak to their open source, but I really enjoy Bambu 3d printer and it works great for me and my 9 year old son.
The problem here is Bambu is an excellent printer. It is MORE reliable than my paper printer and just works!!
New development: Louis Rossman is rehosting the code and dares Bambu to sue him.
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)
> 3d printing tech is obviously dual-use.
Is it though?
? 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?
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.
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.
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.
This is the dude that creams himself everytime Apple releases a computer, he doesn't give a lick about ownership at a principled level, only if it affects him personally.
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.
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'm supportive of Jeff's general philosophy towards open source, but this feels a little disingenuous. Did Bambu mishandle the situation? Absolutely. But we need to stop vilifying companies for being cloud-first. The reality is that 99% of their users set up the printer and app using the cloud service. It's easy and convenient. The slicer is still open source, and you can still use their printers without the cloud. (Yes there was some fighting after their security issue in 2025, but they did put in an effort to maintain compatibility with third party slicers even if it was misguided and/or out of touch.
Bambu has every right to restrict or limit how their cloud service is used, even if they do it in a completely insecure and trivially reproducible way (a user agent).
I'm curious from a legal perspective - the user agent in the Bambu slicer is AGPLed, so copyright wise it seems anyone could put it in their own slicer too. Nonetheless, something feels wrong to me about saying you're a Bambu slicer when you're actually not. Bambu is going after it because of the user agreement, but is there any other legal standing for complaint?
I think it's more disingenuous to call "trying to ruin a guy's life" "mishandling the situation". Also
* user agent spoofing has been common practice on the web for decades * Bambu's customers were bait and switched here. They bought a printer that works locally, and Bambu wants to remove features from the product they paid for. And it's the _customer_ who's actually running this slicer and impersonating Bambu.
Imagine if you bought a car with Carplay/Android Auto. A year later, the manufacturer pushes an OTA update that locks Carplay behind a subscription. But they have terrible security, just trusting the car itself to say if it has a subscription, so you use use pirate software to bypass the restriction and get free Carplay.
This is a far more financially damaging outcome for the car manufacturer, closer to stealing than user agent impersonation, but I would still argue that its morally justified. Consumers should have a right to fight rug-pulls, especially a physical product. This behavior from companies would never have been acceptable before the internet.
> trying to ruin a guy's life
They asked him to remove it and threatened to send a cease and desist. They didnt even send the cease and desist, which they very well could have. Hardly an accurate characterization.
> They bought a printer that works locally, and Bambu wants to remove features from the product they paid for. And it's the _customer_ who's actually running this slicer and impersonating Bambu.
This just isn't true. You can still run it locally and still use third party slicers locally.
> being cloud-first. The reality is that 99% of their users set up the printer and app using the cloud service
Part of me thinks that the particular kind of enshittification we've come to see with devices, where something that certainly needs no cloud has a hard cloud dependency baked in, is partly an accident of the networking environment everything has grown up in.
When broadband and then especially Wi-Fi caught on, using NAT was so practical, solving both the "how do we properly configure a firewall to only route good traffic" problem, and the "we don't have enough routable IPs for every smart toaster or baby monitor to get one."
Only after this reality and assumption had been completely baked into every home network and the devices used to build those networks, then we started to see IoT devices, which really benefit from remote access. Companies added cloud because it was the only way to make that work - and most of them didn't want to implement and support a different protocol for LAN usage when that wouldn't sell any more devices.
I wonder if we had started out with ipv6 before the wi-fi boom happened, and every device had a routable address, and wi-fi routers always had good firewalls, and UPNP had not launched with immediate security issues... I wonder if we would have seen much more direct connectivity enabled by companies who given the choice, would rather sell a device that didn't need anything from them to support, instead of a device they're obligated to run servers for (at least for a few years).
> we need to stop vilifying companies for being cloud-first.
No. Absolutely not. Cloud-first is privacy-second, and rental model with ever-changing fees and terms of use.
> Cloud-first is privacy-second
This is not necessarily true. There are technical solutions to preserve privacy, end to end encryption being a very common one. That being said, Bambu strikes me as a very competent 3D printer designer, but not so much a competent software designer.
> rental model
I don't think this really applies to a hardware company selling 3D printers. You can always still use SFTP or SD cards to print. A big selling point for them is the ecosystem and being able to, for example, find a model on the app while you're on the road, send it to your printer, and have it be done by the time you get home. If this weren't cloud enabled, most of their customers wouldn't be able to get it to work because things like VPN or tailscale are well beyond them.
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.
They're not just abusing the open source social contract, they're abusing people's non-confrontational nature to bully them.
This is a pretty clear case in court to me - Bambu would lose it.
I think we should go to court and beat Bambu into submission here.
So happy to see this climbing HackerNews. I hope someone at Bambu gets their head out of their ass after this debacle, but I'm not holding my breath
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.
A device easily capable of burning your house/office down at that.
Oh, I wasn't aware of that. I knew that it would by possible by sole fact that you have computer with network interface attached as a printer but I didn't know it have mechanism exactly for this purpose.
> 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
It could be enough if the nozzle just stops moving while touching the model being printed - based on the type of material, it might start burning.
And if you want to be outright malicious, you can disable maximum temperature control and do the same with much hotter nozzle rammed into the model - and even print an extra burnable model when you are at it!
Or count on the power supply or the wiring catching fire instead due to overload.
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.
I would have never done this 10 years ago with the garbage printers that were pieced together like science projects rather than finished products.
But a modern enclosed bambu printer is a much better engineered device. Bambu is mature enough as a company that they've issued formal recalls for device issues before. This would never happen with the aliexpress specials that used to dominate the market.
Bambu printers (and other reputable modern printers) are being run unattended at scale all the time without issue.
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.
We built an enclosure fort our printers from a metal storage rack & added active ventilation that suck out any fumes outside the building. Still, you need to physically get there, check the bed is clean & start the print manually.
There are are also regular software checks for overheating or thermistor wiring failing & we know they are there and are enabled as we built the Marlin firmware ourself from source (which is quite easy once you properly configure it). Not to mention we are sure we are the ones in control over the firmware.
We also have a bunch of web cameras watching the printers print that we can monitor remotely.
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.
Straight propaganda. Printers have burned down apartments in the last five years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/anycubic/comments/1j4kfsr/guys_just...
Anycubic is a poor quality brand that doesn't really go through the engineering effort to design good quality stuff. These types of printers definitely still exist, no doubt.
But, it's not really straight propaganda that the well designed machines (Bambu, Prusa, and many other vendors) don't have these issues.
You can find equally alarming statements about all sorts of other poor quality goods.
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".
> Homeowners insurance rarely actually covers everything lost in a fire,
Why wouldn't it? Unless you don't have enough coverage, it should cover all losses fully. Literally the point of insurance. You may not properly claim everything lost, but that's on you. Insurance claims 101: giving a very clear itemized list of everything lost in an insurance claim.
> and takes years to pay out in many cases.
Years? Why would it take years? Maybe 6-12 months, but you can get claims rolling relatively quickly. Most of the time is probably going to be your time spent itemizing all the stuff lost.
When the risk of a printer catching on fire and burning down your house is very, very low, why wouldn't you rely on insurance? You have the draw the line somewhere.
> 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...
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.
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.
Hacker News - the place where shills love to make reasonable sounding arguments.
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.
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.
You are conflating two things: appeasement and actual change in principles. Externally it can be hard to distinguish these, but it is easier to get a sense of it with more signals.
From Bambu’s historical and continued actions, specifically including the orca slicer actions that this blog post was about, there is additional signal that LAN mode backpedaling was more likely an appeasement action than a shift in principles to embrace a more open ecosystem.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
It is very dubious way to subvert GPL, even GPL2, not to mention [A]GPL3.
It was discussed many times that you cannot have close-sourced plugin for GPL host program, as loading plugin is linkage and it is covered by full GPL (only LGPL has linkage exclusion).
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 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: the core of macOS (Darwin) is open source. Does that mean everyone running Darwin or a fork of it should be able to use iCloud services for free?
All this outrage essentially sounds like "since Bambu Lab's slicer is open-source, the open-source community should be able to point any slicer at Bambu Lab's servers to get free remote monitoring services". And I don't think that's right.
> They aren't doing anything to block OrcaSlicer or any fork from working with the printer using LAN-only mode.
They did. Since the first update in early 2025 LAN-only mode isn't enough to use 3rd party software anymore. Eventually they (partially) caved to the extensive backlash and added "developer mode" which completely exposes your printer by removing existing access controls, coercing users into either giving up control, or giving up basic security in order to maintain full control of our printers.
It sounds like they're doing what people want. People seem to be ascribing a lot of mal-intent to actions that don't seem malicious to me.
> completely exposes your printer by removing existing access controls
If these printers are in LAN-only mode and you want to point 3rd-party software at them, don't you kind of expect the existing access controls (which are probably at least in part tied to cloud services) to be removed? Behind a LAN with developer mode on, you're generally going to (1) not be exposed to the internet anyway, and (2) probably know what you're doing and would be implementing access controls yourself anyway.
If you want a completely open (hardware and software) 3D printer, don't get a Bambu Lab machine I guess? A big part of the value of their printers is that they've managed to make everything so seamless. Some of that relies on a somewhat closed ecosystem. They're the Apple of 3D printers, but everyone keeps expecting them to be the Linux, just because their slicer (or parts of it anyway) is open-source. If openness is more important to you than those conveniences, go with a different brand. It's a good thing we have choices as consumers :)
> don't you kind of expect the existing access controls (which are probably at least in part tied to cloud services) to be removed
No, and it's absurd that you would suggest that on a technical forum in 2026, and no, they're not tied to cloud services in any way. Do you also grant root access to anyone on your LAN, by default and without credentials?
> If you want a completely open (hardware and software) 3D printer, don't get a Bambu Lab machine I guess? [and the rest]
My mistake, I didn't realize you were just here to engage in bad faith bullshit and peddle the company's PR statements from last year. These changes are happening after we already bought our printers.
I love my X1C. It's way ahead of any other 3D printer I've owned or built. I stuck it in a VLAN from day 1. Have had it in LAN-only mode for years. Works great. I haven't followed the company's PR statements, but seems a little strange that they would tell people not to get a Bambu Lab printer for any reason.
I'm sorry your experience has been so terrible or that you thought you were buying an open-ecosystem printer. I never got that impression, so I never expected it.
And in 2026, I wouldn't trust access controls on their own even if Bambu Lab did keep them enabled in this situation (who's to say they don't include a back door of their own?). I prefer security at the network level, enforcing access controls before any untrusted hosts can even see a machine that I want to protect on the network.
We've strayed so far off topic. Try to get a handle on your fanboyism and you might be able to see this discussion more rationally.
Why do you feel the need to justify your purchase in public and talk about how great the printer is? Bambu make good printers and nobody is disputing that.
And for the record, my own experience hasn't been terrible at all, it's been predominantly positive.
However that doesn't change the fact that their overall dishonest corporate behavior, pushing unjustified user-hostile changes after the sale, violating the AGPL license of Prusa slicer, and legally bullying independent developers is immoral, illegal, and generally indefensible. Nobody wants to live in a world where this sort of behavior is normalized.
Furthermore "LAN only mode" has been neglected and generally half-broken for years. It was a hobbled alternative before they broke it even further.
https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/4512
> I prefer security at the network level
You do you, but the world has moved on since the 90s. Communication is expected to be end to end encrypted, credentials should be revocable, and you generally don't want to grant every process on your device unrestricted ability to set your house on fire.
Disgracefully, this is being done in the name of "security".
Wow, I'm surprised how much I disgree with the HN consensus here. This feels to me, (almost) entirely in Bambu's side here. I'd say their security sucks and they should have implemented some kind of secure accounts so random person without account can't interact with their service like 1000s of other services. But, otherwise, they're right that you don't have a license to their service, only to the AGPLed software.
> 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.
does his phone/laptop choice detract from the points being made in the post regarding bambu?
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.
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" in your thesis. 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.
If you use an unrooted Pixel, why are we even having this conversation, and if not.. well maybe the dude just wants to use a secure wallet.
Regardless of this influencer's "real life" persona I see nothing incongruent about even their "influencer" persona using an iPhone. Therefore I see no relevance to anything in your original comment.
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