Posted by Velocifyer 12 hours ago
Without the networking plugin you cannot monitor your printer or send prints to it remotely. You can copy files to a flash drive and print that way.
It’s absolutely insane how little they would have to do to be good community members and choose not to.
I honestly don't want another maintenance hobby. I just want something that works and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
You are right to say Prusa is more of a hobbyist machine while Bambu is closer to a consumer appliance. But within the hobbyist spectrum Prusa is more on the light hobby side these days. My first printer was a Printrbot where I was hand-entering G-code to move the nozzle around and level the bed. Prusa is a dream compared to that.
I like Prusa as a company (and the guy), and I like the community around it. The machine is simple, keeps working, parts are available, and you can understand and repair it if you need to.
(I don't understand people who build print farms from Bambu Lab machines at all; I do get using Prusas.)
However I've seen so many non technical people having fun with 3d printers at a pure hobby level at this point it's hard to not recommend Bambu in some way.
Though I would caveat my assertion by saying that if the specific form factor of the A1 Mini (which is a nice thing) matters to you, and it well might, there’s probably no alternative for that single machine, to be fair.
But I would still choose something else.
Personally I think the “just works” 3D printer is largely the result of cognitive bias. It’s a machine tool that melts plastic: I don’t think this is the appropriate territory for “just works”. But that’s just me.
The other printers are basically custom designs by this point & you need to fix things sometimes - like recently erosion of the filament eationg away enough of the idler arm to slip from the forwarding wheel. But I don't mind, because I can easily fix all of that with either 3D printed bits or easily & cheaply available common parts.
I don't mind because I know I can fix ynathing on those printers! No issues like with 2D printers with closed firmware that worksa against you to print secret dots, only accepts locked down blessed overpriced consumables & fails to print if only one color runs low. Not to mention the bloody thing is basically unfixable & any drivers already suck + they will drop support on a whim anyway.
Seriously, would rather fix the 3D printer after every print than to deal with the level of bulshit common on 2D printers - and ot seems to me that Bambu is trying to achieve exactly that!
This is why hobby printers continue to be a time sink, while my Bambu just works. It's a tool, I shouldn't have to fix it after each use.
My current machine is a bit of a weirdo. A formerly basic Creality Ender 2 Pro (the cheapest possible small bed model) that I have had for more than four years, which has always been an unusually excellent machine for fine work, and now has a hardened steel nozzle in a faster heating/higher temperature hotend, mesh bed levelling, direct drive extruder, tidier cables (!), Klipper/KlipperScreen, and an even tighter calibration situation.
I am not at all bothered about pushing machine limits, and I am not an electronics or hardware tinkerer at all. Not my mindset. I don't print stuff for the sake of printing, and I'm much more focussed on learning CAD techniques.
The upgrades were done as a systematic plan to teach myself how the basic functions of a typical modern machine work on a much deeper level, so I can teach and help others. (Life plan changes)
And indeed only once I knew I have need of a larger machine anyway — not that I've bought it yet, for life reasons.
It's nice that it's a little faster, prints higher temperature materials better, levels more easily and more precisely, is now super dimensionally accurate, and my modestly-custom Klipper config has let me dabble with support interface layer swaps by smoothing over some of the details of filament changes, which is cool. In many ways it is like having a newer machine.
I still don't feel like a hardware or electronics guy and I'm not a performance tinkerer. The machine is upgraded, prints superbly, and now I just use it when I need to use it.
But what I have internalised is that I should be able to run my printer as long as I want, with what software I want, understand it and fix it if I need to. I absolutely don't want to tinker for the sake of it, but I also don't want to cross fingers and rely on a machine being great from the factory. If fixing it means changing it, that's fine with me.
If you are intending to print things for which quality and precision matters, then there is no substitute for understanding the machine more deeply, and that means a machine that will let you understand it.
This new understanding is really challenging my choice of what I buy for my workshop, because to some extent this window of deeper understanding is closing. There are, by contrast, many "off the shelf" machines that compete with (and outperform) Bambu machines at comparable and lower prices.
I come at this from the other direction. I was your stereotypical guitar-playing, photographer, software nerd; I would never have tried making physical things until I realised I wanted to make photography accessories.
(Also some of my experience with expensive machines has been very spendy inkjet printers.)
But I also want to teach (adults) and I have therefore developed a tendency to teach myself anything I am interested in at enough of a level that I could teach someone newer to it.
There are just too many sketchy things around Bambu for me to take them seriously.
I will concede I am using a budget Creality, and that almost none of the alternative players have the strongest reputation for open source ethics, so it is a narrowed field.
But I can see myself buying a Snapmaker, a Prusa, or a Sovol, on the budget fringes the newer Flashforge printers are shockingly good, and for the entry level I don't massively mind what Anycubic are doing with the Kobra X; it's not heavy duty but potentially has some applications.
I don't think I'd buy a Creality again. But it's in no way because of my experience with them or with the machine I bought or its upgrades; this experience has been in very significant ways a life-changing one.
I just don't think they appear to be better at doing the more closed products than they were at the dirt cheap stuff (industry-changing machines for which they catch undue shit), and they turn over new products too fast.
Where I am more challenged is CNC.
I definitely don't know how I feel here, because on the one hand I'd like a large-ish MPCNC or scrappy eBay CNC to rough out lap steel guitars and conversion necks; big coarse-ish-but-accurate woodcutting I am bad at by hand. And on the other hand, for the photography stuff in particular, I have definite applications for a Carvera Z1.
I guess the answer may be to do both. But the same process of assessment will be involved in this case.
[1] I won't say "copyright", because if this was about pirated Marvel movies, it absolutely would be getting the same treatment.
[2] $30K Worth of Multimeters Must Be Destroyed Because They're Yellow - https://news.slashdot.org/story/14/03/19/1721253/30k-worth-o...
If you go on social media where people are talking about 3D printing, a lot of folks are not developers and don't know anything about software licensing. It is hard to explain this problem to them, or why anyone should care. Meanwhile for many of these people, Bambu is totally synonymous with 3D printing.
Prusa has attracted its own valid criticisms, but I think they are closer to being right on these issues. They can't compete with Bambu on price.
While the ecosystem was open few people cared about the network plugin, and apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source. Similarly there was little interest in calling out the suspected violation of their online slicer - it's probably just a headless variant of Bambu Studio. But when Bambu started closing their ecosystem and claiming that user agent headers are DRM everyone got justifiably upset, and this is a just outlet for that
But IIRC the plugin itself contains code covered by the open source licenses, either that or being directly linked the way it is is considered sufficient for the requirements of the license to apply.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the GPL is it's meant to block this kind of behavior. Certainly it's against the spirit of it.
But Prusa is only engaged in self-harm.
Which is somewhat funny because a lot of high-impact piracy stuff is on Github and has been for years. GenP (Adobe) and Massgrave MAS (anything Microsoft) come to my mind.
It's questionable whether those two companies care that much about piracy, they make most of their money off enterprise, right? For a while I heard it theorized that Adobe and Microsoft largely let people get away with it, since it still keeps them in the ecosystem and therefore makes them likelier to use those products at work. Versus Bambu which probably still sells mainly to random hobbyists/home users
That is more than just a theory, their own documents (I can't remember if they were leaked or officially released as part of the big anti-trust case) stated that this was essentially their policy for poor eastern counties: if they wouldn't be paying for it anyway MS preferred them to use it rather than something else (like Linux, or something locally created, etc,).
It was less openly ignored in the case of students, or people using work licenses (or just pirate copies) at home, but the above and the lack of enforcement would indicate it was ignored for that reason.
This would be a lot more convincing if the stolen part were the great part, as happens in music.