Principally if you sell a device with a certain functionality and you later modify that device later to remove that functionality that is called theft. It does not matter the slightest bit whether you break into someone's house to physically alter the device or whether you remotely install a malicious software update to do that.

But what's even more insane here is that some people are claiming that BambooLabs would somehow have the right to do this, because while BambooLab might not have the right to limit the hardware they already sold (which they did and these people just pretend did not happen) they have the right to limit their printer client software under the license conditions they impose on it from the beginning, when their printer client is literally a modification of AGPL licensed software. The entire point of the GPL is to prevent people like BambooLabs from doing exactly this. The AGPL is literally the single license with the most restrictions on BambooLabs to ensure that the users of the software — the customers — do not have any restrictions in what they can do with it.

Some people are seeing this situation and just decide to side with the company against their customers on imposing restrictions on an already sold product after the sale and they are literally making shit up to justify it.

Edit: For people who do not know what this is about: Someone modified AGPL software to reenable features of these 3D printers that BambooLabs stole after the sale and BambooLabs sent a legal threat to them to stop distributing the software.

Never buying a cartridge based inkjet printer again.

I did a ton of research because I didn't understand what people wanted here, and this is what's going on:

Right now, Bambu have adjusted their system into two modalities:

* "default" or "Cloud" mode, where you get an app, remote monitoring, but you have to use Bambu Studio or Bambu Connect to send prints. They implemented this by adding cloud auth to their "internal API;" the client application has to get a token from Bambu's servers, even if the request it eventually makes is a "local" one.

* LAN / Developer mode, where the device displays a token and you put it into your app. This disables all of the remote monitoring but in exchange, clients can send prints locally.

What users want is to "have their cake and eat it too;" they want the local token authentication _and_ the cloud authentication enabled at the same time. This isn't actually possible, so this plugin approximates it by emulating the interface to the cloud authentication to make the "Bambu Network" cloud RPC calls from a local slicer (one of these calls is a local_print call, so ostensibly this allows you to send prints without running them through the cloud, although with all of the online functionality still enabled and required, this seems like a pretty brave thing to trust).

Personally, I find the Bambu reaction distasteful, and there's an argument that the offline mode only exists due to similar outrage, but I don't see the current system as particularly bad and find the appetite to restore "untrustworthy" cloud functionality a bit amusing.

This is only true due to a firmware they pushed last year. It's an artificial limit.

There's no reason at all a local client couldn't just talk to a local printer without any cloud.

Every problem BambuLabs have here is self-inflicted. They could allow simultaneous cloud and local queue management with or without authentication.

You can even go so far and have a public sub domain for each devices ( serialnumber.manufacturer.com ) which you only operate as a dumb proxy so that even the TLS certificates are negotiated end-to-end between the IoT device and Let's Encrypt. (The devices connect to your backend via Wireguard and you rate limit with their device individual key, whose public key you read out during the end-of-line production step.)

Hell, with today's browser heavy applications you can even run the whole slicer in the browser. Let the app be distributed via CDN so the code does not need to go through the proxy.

[1] In the case of non-battery operated and always or mostly on devices, like 3d printers at least.

They should have no rights to control how people use hardware they bought. ToS for hardware should simply be unenforceable.

People should have full rights to adversarial interoperability, even if it means modifying proprietary software or hardware.

It always surprises me when people (on this site particularly) are more interested in the law as it stands than how things could or should be.

I wonder whether tech has become so exploitative partly because so many of us have lost track of (or never understood) how important civil disobedience has always been in the process of democracy and securing our rights.

As an individual you really don’t have to follow the terms of service! You certainly don’t have to support the [ab]use of ToS, DRM and related tech to screw you at every opportunity!

By "many" do you mean Bambu Lab themselves who are violating the AGPL license of Prusa slicer & predecessors with their non-AGPL, proprietary networking plugin?

They're choosing to violate the license because they don't think anyone will actually dare to sue them, and they're probably right. Ascribing some sort of moral righteousness to Bambu's actions and accusing users of breaking their license is hysterical.

By attempting to stop users from using their AGPL code they are behaving illegally.

If you want to use Bambu's software against their TOS, OK you wouldn't be alone in that, but there's no moral high ground in it.

In most countries, that would violate consumer rights. There's an ethics argument here.

Feel free to consult Steam, Google, Meta and others, if a software license is enough to ignore consumer rights.

Will this mean that Bambu will withdraw from the Australian market? Possibly maybe probably, but the ACCC takes a very hard stance against bait and switch.

I'd be reasonably happy to lodge a complaint if I could find a version that's reasonably articulated. As a Bambu customer in Australia I switched my printer to local mode and its been great.

Worth pointing out also that the US is the odd one out, here. Europe also enforces consumer rights.

Yes, it's not as simple as that, but it's not that impossible either.

This kind of firmware update to remotely disable feature is also illegal in the EU

When I buy a product, I look at reviews and make my purchasing decision on the features and functionality at the time of sale. If a software update later ruins that, I want the option to get my money back.

Regardless, at least in the US, not only are software-based ToS becoming unenforceable, but there’s a large upswing towards “right to repair” legislation, which, I think, is what you’re arguing against here… and I really think you’re going to be on the wrong side of history with your current line of thinking (despite what Bambu Labs does).

I have no idea why you think copyright violations apply here? You seem to be throwing legal terms around without regard for their actual meaning. It's clear you're here to argue for the sake of argument, but I'd really encourage you to reflect and think about why you're so loyal to a corporate entity instead of your fellow consumers (of which there are many in the parent and sibling comments... hint: you may be on the wrong side).

Just for fun, pretend you bought a propane grill for cooking on Monday. On Tuesday, you cooked some bbq chicken and some corn. Later on Thursday, and without your knowledge or authorization, the grill no longer allowed you to use the propane apparatus for cooking non-meats unless you call a special telephone number and said a magic word whenever the call was answered. As a minimum, I feel, it'd be very confusing because, even though you're doing the exact same thing as Tuesday, the outcome is not the same.

Your freedoms have been restricted by someone else; if you are okay with that, then have fun licking boots. The rest of us will still be here advocating for your freedoms.

At worst, its a fraudulent indefinite rental masquerading as a 'sale'.

And lets discuss 'updates that fuck over your hardware'. In dwcent countries, thats hacking, and a serious criminal charge. But lol, companies are somehow exempt.

There’s a small benefit of anti-circumvention where businesses sell hardware for cheaper with restrictions and a TOS that prevents bypassing them. But even that doesn’t apply here because Bambu changed the software after purchase.

If so, then yes, the software too

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...

Nobody is arguing against Bambu's legal right to be arseholes.

> If you want to use Bambu's software against their TOS

How does the TOS get involved here? I don't use their TOS. Why would or should they be able to enforce it? Note that it also depends on the jurisdiction. For instance, Microsoft's EULA never had any legal bearings in the EU.

The issue here is less "they put in a restriction" and more "they are trying to bankrupt/imprison consumers for daring to modify the property they purchased."

I could interpret this three ways:

1. It's a reflexive double-down "nuh uh" denial, with no deeper cause.

2. You jumped in without knowing the risks that people (regular non-rich ones, anyway) face from lawsuits or CFAA charges, and you assumed the OrcaSlicer maintainer abandoned their project just to be polite.

3. You're whining that Bambu lawyers were "forced" to make disproportionate threats with nonsense logic. (Which isn't a huge step up, because it means they're still telling threatening lies for their own benefit.)

Legal representation typically has a cost associated to the individual, unless you have the state put down a lawyer for you. You could assume that bankrupting may not be the primary goal by Bambu Lab, but it most assuredly can be an associated outcome, in particular if your income is comparatively low. I don't think sarcasm is appropriate here.

> I didn't understand what people wanted here

Great: very few people care enough to actually try to understand! This is very much appreciated.

> What users want is to "have their cake and eat it too;" they want the local token authentication _and_ the cloud authentication enabled at the same time

No.

What I want is to use any slicer software (specifically OrcaSlicer, which is really good) with Bambu printers without losing functionality.

What most people who do not use 3d printing regularly do not understand is that there is more to 3d printing than just throwing a sliced file over the wall. For example, before I slice, I sync information from the printer so that the list of filaments I have in the slicer reflects what is actually in the printer. This sounds silly to people who imagine a printer with a single spool of filament loaded, but when you have multiple printers, each one with an AMS unit housing 4 spools, this becomes essential.

Please also remember that many people have printers in remote locations (workshop). "LAN mode" is a non-starter unless you set up a VPN.

I also want to monitor my prints using my phone, which is what Bambu Lab sold me: it is part of the functionality of the printer. I do not want to lose that functionality.

In other words, "LAN/Developer Mode" is NOT EQUIVALENT to "Cloud" mode (which used to work well with OrcaSlicer until Bambu killed it).

Excellent machines by the way, primarily let down by the proprietary binary Bambu forces users to use for LAN mode which is extremely buggy and slow on Linux, and entirely technically unnecessary.

Developer mode doesn’t require the proprietary binary.

There are two problems here. One is when the manufacturer sells something with some capabilities and later pulls the rug from under the users and decides to arbitrarily take some features away. This should entitle any customer to take an arbitrary amount of money back from the manufacturer. The second problem is that after a customer buys the product they aren't allowed to own it. If I buy a hammer I'm, allowed to cut it open, dissect everything, modify the handle or the head. That's ownership, not some shallow dismissal that user want to "have their cake and eat it too".

If someone sells you a cake then follows you down the street to take the frosting and one of the layers back, and tells you that any attempt to restore the cake is a crime, you'd start questioning whether it's really your cake to begin with, and what exactly are you eating.

It looks like it might be a clone, but the git history is squashed for some reason.

I would recommend against installing this unless/until someone can do an audit to figure out which commit it was forked from and what the changes are.

Or better yet, find one of any of the other copies of the repository that don't have their git history squashed.

This looks like someone's attempt to capitalize on the drama to bring attention to their foundation (?) but losing git history is not a good thing for code provenance or security.

FULU Foundation is a right to repair group, which explains their interest in this. I, for one, support them. https://www.fulu.org/our-story

I agree with your point about git history, though. https://github.com/FULU-Foundation/OrcaSlicer-bambulab/issue...

> What users want is to "have their cake and eat it too;" they want the local token authentication _and_ the cloud authentication enabled at the same time. This isn't actually possible, so this plugin approximates it by emulating the interface to the cloud authentication to make the "Bambu Network" cloud RPC calls from a local slicer (one of these calls is a local_print call, so ostensibly this allows you to send prints without running them through the cloud, although with all of the online functionality still enabled and required, this seems like a pretty brave thing to trust).

AIUI Bamba has made cloud access all or nothing: you either use local mode, with local slicing, and no cloud feature access at all, or you use cloud mode, with cloud slicing and access to all of the cloud features.

Can anyone explain what the cloud features that people want to retain are? Is it just app control of the printer, and print monitoring? Or are there other things to miss out on?

This is not the case of "wanting to have their cake and eat it too", as there is nothing mutually exclusive about these things. It requires no "emulation" or hacks - having a local API open to query state and push print jobs to the queue, while the printer connects to the cloud to publish state and pull the next job, presents no conflict.

Ultimaker has a similar feature set and had full local/cloud simultaneous integration. The only thing you "lost" by pushing a job locally was that when viewed in the cloud portal, the mini 3D model preview in the queue was missing, and only because they never bothered making the cloud solution pull it from the printer for local jobs.

But then they also did like Bambu and killed local printing entirely because they are all enterprise-only now want to sell you their higher Digital Factory subscriptions.

> Being able to push prints and use the printer with direct local connection, while simultaneously having remote monitoring and remote printing when cloud/internet works and is available.

So isn't an obvious approach to just cut Bambu out altogether and just create a FOSS cloud alternative, supporting the remote aspects that the users want to retain?

> This is not the case of "wanting to have their cake and eat it too", as there is nothing mutually exclusive about these things.

Nothing technically mutually exclusive, but isn't this exactly the choice that Bambu is enforcing? Which is crappy corporate enshittification behaviour, but something they can do if they so choose? (I'm not arguing in their favour - just trying to fully clarify the situation.)

My only gripe with the community approach is, why not replace them rather than attempt to use ANY servers they have? Jeff cleverly highlighted that all the slicers originate from Slic3r, there is always a point before Bambu.

tl;dr: The original developer does not (or cannot) go into legal battle with Bambu Lab, so Louis Rossmann's project picked up the fight and hosts the (allegedly) troublesome code on their organization. As they have more financial resources, they look forward to the C&D letter.

The point he has (and I agree with that): The original developer is using the un-modified AGPL-code to talk to the cloud API. Bambu Lab states that the modified client pretends to be a Bambu lab client. But in fact, the modified client just uses the code as-is, which is perfectly fine from a AGPL perspective. From my non-lawyer point of view: If Bambu Lab would have made the User Agent a configurable variable, which gets set by some configuration files from outside the code, that get bundled with the binary version, but not the source code, they wouldn't have this leverage.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jhRqgHxEP8

It seems more likely they want it as a revenue source at some point.

The current monetization that they are using is that you can charge for a print on their platform and they take a cut of the sale. If you don’t charge for the design, then it is still free hosting and delivery.

I see where the worry is, but at the moment it seems like people are imagining a worse case scenario.

No, we aren’t being blocked. Turn on LAN mode, pair regular Orca slicer, ignore Bambu for the rest of eternity. Plenty of people have done it.

You're just saying that Bambu users feel the need to purposely circumvent Bambu's artificial restrictions to be able to continue to use Bambu hardware they bought and paid for.

No matter how you frame this, this ain't right.

It's a toggle you set in the printer directly, nothing is circumvented. Only the access through their cloud service is impacted, but the printer works locally like any other.

That's an artificial vendor tie-in, and arguably a feature that only involves their client app and their backend. It's understandable if access to their backend is restricted to a subset of their users if that's the business model they wish. Preventing paying customers from using the hardware they bought and paid for by imposing artificial restrictions is not cool.

They've bought a machine that executes gcode and that it does (at least to my understanding) regardless of where that gcode comes from.

If you want special secret sauce gcode from the bambu cloud, you need to use the bambu cloud.

Those are not the same thing, so IMO it is legit what they do there, because it's such a clear-cut split. You own the physical thing but not the ecosystem around it.

___

I would of course personally never buy a bambu lab printer, because they're cloud-tied nonsense that was going to behave exactly like that (the split between hw and ecosystem), but other people knew that too and still bought it, because "what a nice ecosystem".

idk. I just don't think that "right to repair" should mean "right to be saved from the consequences of my own bad actions".

Those bad actions continuing to have no real painful consequences (and with that no real learnings + behavioral correction) after all is why the state of tech has become as bleak as it is right now.

And, honestly, if you can afford a bambu premium machine, there's a 97% chance that you could easily shoulder a total write-off. There's also a 97% chance that your ego can't, but that's the main thing causing all the bad things in the world and should've died a long time ago. Approximately post-highschool.

I wouldn't buy an alternative to a P1S, because only the P1S is the best at being the P1S. (Whatever that might entail)

Instead, I'd look at things from the perspective of "what do I want?" and not "What does the market offer? Okay, I want that thing. But no, I want an alternative to it that is that thing but without downside"

Letting a brand set your frame of reference is the first step into total dependence.

That's what I meant with "the P1S is the best at being the P1S when measured by the P1S".

I am pretty sure that if you for example do functional PLA parts, there will be many, many more options that tick exactly that box.

I do of course understand that people want to have the mental peace of buying one thing and being told that it can do everything, but, as said, you pay for that emotional labor with lock-in and eventually being rug-pulled.

The only way of not getting rug-pulled is not handing away all of your agency wholesale just for cheap immediate emotional relief.

That's how it works, how it has always worked and how it will always work. Anyone claiming anything else is in the process of actively scamming you.

This isn't the thing you're talking about. There's a mode where I can send prints directly over the network which disables Bambu Studio, I assume?

This sounds really unpleasant to use. Maybe users just want a better UX for the local mode?

Take a step back. What users want is to be able to use the machine they bought the way they want. The outrage is because Bambu are doing a bait-and-switch: selling an autonomous 3D printer, but switching to a 3D printing service. Enshittification pure and simple.

A different way of looking at it is that Bambu is saying if you want to use their cloud you have to send everything through their cloud. Stupid? Sure. It's very much a technically solvable problem. But I don't think there was any rug pull (this time; in Jan 2025 they tried...)

I think this is all more out of incompetence than malice. Something bad happens, exposing wildly inadequate programming expertise, they panic and over correct, and the community pushes back. They're great at making 3D printers, terrible at cloud infra.

More likely, it's technical incompetence. It's just easier (for their cloud) to send everything through their cloud

Using an AGPL violating mystery meat binary plugin that you run on your host, which potentially compromises any airgap you put around your printer (it attempts to connect to bambu servers, or did last time I checked it) and potentially your entire host.

Can you read the filaments installed in the printer over MQTT too?

Here's a good resource: https://github.com/Doridian/OpenBambuAPI

This is a very dubious opinion to hold. Taking your claim about local mode at face value, there is absolutely no reason to disable monitoring when working on LAN mode. You need to go way out of your way to implement that restriction so that it works differently when the thing phones home or not. You are free to criticize implementation decisions that you feel make it "untrustworthy" but those are trivial to address if you think about it.

I really recommend you to reassess your whole philosophical stance on having corporations prevent you from using what you bought and paid for.

I'm not sure why their entire domain has been excluded from archive.org but you can still see the original post for now: https://blog.bambulab.com/firmware-update-introducing-new-au...

--

Critical Operations That Require Authorization The following printer operations will require authorization controls:

Binding and unbinding the printer. Initiating remote video access. Performing firmware upgrades. Initiating a print job (via LAN or cloud mode). Controlling motion system, temperature, fans, AMS settings, calibrations, etc.

Because they have a track record of altering their website, gaslighting the community, and then getting caught through archive.org so they simply blocked it, not realizing that other archives exist and then getting caught again.

They tried to alter their warranty terms and got caught. They altered their ToS which would allow them to block prints until the printer firmware was updated. When the community got upset, they not only backpedaled but altered the associated blog post and accused everyone of spreading baseless misinformation because "it's clearly explained in this [edited, backdated] article".

That's precisely the article you linked to. See the original version:

http://archive.today/2025.01.16-173123/https://blog.bambulab...

Think about why they'd make such a request to archive.org.

Other vendors take note !

Local network support tends to look like a convenience feature until it disappears. Then it becomes obvious that it was part of the ownership model.

That’s a complete misunderstanding of the current state of affairs. Bambu didn’t take away local network support, and you can use any Bambu printer without any cloud or internet connection.

What you can’t do is use a 3rd party slicer with their cloud servers…

Yes they did. Chronology is important because it speaks to their motives. First they blocked Orca slicer and others from connecting to the printer even when the printer is running in LAN-only mode. Due to extensive backlash they later split "LAN mode" into "Standard mode LAN mode" and "Developer mode LAN mode".

The former, officially recommended, "secure" mode would prevent Orca slicer and others from using the printer.

"Developer mode LAN mode" dropped all form of access control (including existing access code + serial number pairing mechanism), leaving users completely exposed - any device on your network, and any process on your machine can freely take control of the printer. They simultaneously absolved themselves of all customer support responsibilities for anyone using this mode.

They also abandoned all work on features and bugs related to LAN mode (whether they affect standard mode or developer mode). Bambu Slicer is plagued by basic connectivity and usability issues that only affect LAN mode, feature parity is not there and there's been quite literally zero activity on any of the issues I've been following.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jhRqgHxEP8

There’s basically no information there. Is this just a copy of the other GitHub repo that was removed and someone is trying to rebrand it as their own? Or did they do some different work?

the explanation for that is here https://youtu.be/II2QF9JwtLc

basically louis found that not using AI to design his website drastically reduced the hits he would get from google.

(I get that web vitals might be taken into account, but you don't need a slop generator to make a static page)

I'm skeptical but I don't have time to watch the entire video so I don't want to cast an initial judgement on if he's correct or if it just has to do with his specific copy.

...

What are they even trying to rank for? It doesn’t make sense.

The masses love this. Really! They love their slop like the good little cattle they are. Source: I work in this field with customers, they love the AI-slop corpo-fied website that looks like an app.

This is something I learnt early in my start up career, "You are not your customer"; what you value and what your customers value may not be the same.

i'd say that when louis discovered that AI websites work better, it broke him in that regard. the choice is now creating a website that i own, as in "this is mine, i made this". or a website that works with google. but i'd want to distance myself from that website as far as possible. "i didn't make this myself, i needed this for google. i don't want to touch it"

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/synology-caves-walks...

This is admittedly a bit tinfoil hat, but they wouldn't be the first company to attempt to legislate away the competition.

They are also subsidized by the Chinese government and are paying for users exclusively hosting on MakerWorld. Their move is obviously complete market capture, not sustainable finances at this point.

There is a lot of things going on. We can only speculate, but it sure ain't going to benefit end users.

When it's companies based in the U.S. or EU, like Chamberlain / LiftMaster garage door openers, it's pretty obvious they plan to monetize some cloud services subscription for upgraded features beyond the free basic tier as well as probably selling consumer data.

However, the China-based companies like Bambu Lab (and many others) are more puzzling because meaningful ongoing subscription revenue seems unlikely. Especially in the case of lower-end consumer tech peripherals where the companies usually invest as little as possible in their websites, ongoing feature updates or direct end-user support. Which makes no sense if they really aspire to build long-term subscription revenue. Here's my theory: the Chinese government is quietly compelling them to require cloud connections to China-based data centers as a long-term strategy.

I'm not even saying the companies are some direct arm of the Chinese government or planting nefarious firmware. I think that's too likely to be caught if done at mass scale and it's not even necessary. As long as the cloud servers are in Chinese data centers, the Chinese government can get consumer IP addresses and usage data just from passive packet sniffing and if things turn icy with some foreign countries, they can cause a lot of turmoil simply by selectively blocking packets at the firewall to brick millions of consumer devices.

I know it maybe sounds paranoid and, to be clear, I'm not claiming Bambu Labs specifically is doing this. I actually came up with this theory before I ever heard of Bambu Labs because I have a lot of inexpensive Chinese home automation devices and was surprised by their bizarre insistence on forcing cloud connectivity despite there being no apparent business model incentive and these smaller-scale Shenzen hardware companies showing zero enthusiasm for making a real business out of cloud services. Their cloud implementations are almost invariably the bare minimum possible and seem woefully underfunded. After all, for a low-margin hardware peripheral, every dollar spent running a no-revenue cloud after the sale is pure overhead in a business that live or dies by pennies. It's almost like requiring a cloud connection is an export tax the company is paying just to be left alone to sell their hardware overseas.

For home automation gear, cloud-connectivity is a non-starter in my book. In some cases, it's literally built into our walls, so I only buy devices which will work on a local-only subnet or on which I can install open source firmware like Tasmota or ESPHome.

it's been going on since the fucking cloud-into-everything fad started ~15 years ago

Some of the proposed 3d printer laws will require printers being sold to be capable of evaluating what you are using them for and blocking “bad” usages. I’m not aware of any such legislation around firearms.

But for example I had some problems with my linear rods, talked to support for just a few minutes and 2 days later I had replacement parts at my door. This was a few years back though.

Also they give firmware updates, and even hardware upgrade for years! This IS really nice and I'm not sure any other printer manufacturer that sells to private people does this.

Yes, your upfront price is a bit higher. I say it's worth it.

I think it depends mostly on how you expect to use it. There may be alternatives that give you perfect prints with minimal fuzz. But for me it was great to have a machine I dare play around with. Like getting a tractor before a race car :)

So to say you spend significantly less money for a product that will be changed whenever bambu sees fit to whatever extend they see fit.

I regret my bambu purchase a lot. I have to keep up with all the ways bambu wants to lock in my hardware and take it basically away from me.

Wonder how Bambu can prevent this kind of forks, where no code - just instructions to AI on how to build a network plugin from scratch.

I thought that was the point, that people didn't want to be tethered to their servers?

There are many reasons one might prefer OrcaSlicer over Bambu Studio. One might be perfectly fine using Bambu's cloud services while preferring OrcaSlicer for different reasons; this is for those people.

Others might not want to use Bambu's cloud services at all; OrcaSlicer as it currently exists is fine for them.

i bought the dang thing, let me decide how I use it.

Amazing how controversial this statement is here in 2026.

[1] https://octoprint.org/support-octoprint/

I use LAN mode, plus a home assistant plugin to restore the lost functionality. The default webcam is pretty bad so I’ve also mounted a better one to my printer for a live video view that’s at more than 1fps.

The main thing I’ve lost by using lan mode is printing from my phone? I think there are ways to do that. But OrcaSlicer has so many options that are frequently worth adjusting over random presets other creators used; it’s a strictly better experience compared to printing on mobile.

I think there is some niche “cancel printing of one specific object” feature that I dont know how to use without the mobile app. If you are printing many objects at once, and one fails, you can cancel a specific part/object using the mobile app. Not sure how to do that with OrcaSlicer + lan mode, or if it’s even possible. (Edit: OrcaSlicer doesn’t support it. The home assistant plugin might? Bambu studio in lan mode doesn’t support it either, it requires the mobile app)

I don’t mind the sd card thing, also happy with my bottom of the barrel ender 3.

I get it. The convenience of networking - when it works FOR the customer - is great.

But networking controlled by corporations is a path to enshittification.

I could enable LAN mode and trust the mode does what it says.

I could trust others firmware reverse engineering to verify LAN mode does what it says.

I could isolate it on it's own wifi and I could block it at the home firewall from accessing the internet, to be sure.

But it was easier to simply leave it off my network.

Bambu is not (never has been?) targeting 3D printing hobbyist but everyday people; and for them cost/reliability is more important than running your custom slicer. Until there is a serious competitor that has a polished and cheap printer, Bambu can alienate all of the open source community and still be fine.

To me, this is an obvious security risk. These printers are often used in labs, startups, engineering teams, and potentially even government environments. If print data, models, logs, or usage patterns are routed through a company controlled infrastructure, that creates a real opportunity for corporate espionage or data harvesting.

I would not be surprised if Bambu Lab eventually faces the same level of scrutiny that Huawei network devices did.

Like Adobe's 'creative' software and Onshape, they are working as hard as possible to make YOU pay more to have less.

"Computer Vision Model and Nozzle Telemetry Analysis Detect Print Error"?

This isn’t a PC Load Letter we can trust!

Prusa.

It’s like saying a bicycle is a serious contender to a train, they both have kind of similar things going on but you’d have to be insane to suggest that they do as good of a job as one another at the things people actually want to achieve.

Automatic filament changes would be nice for sure, I look forward to upgrading to one of their new INDX models.

i'm mostly printing small mechanical parts and i can't say i have any complaints, i assume a modern prusa would be much better, surely there are other FDM printers that are good?