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For everyone in the EU who bought their product within the last two years directly from Bambu Land or from a German reseller:
Stay calm. There is a very highly probability that German customer protection laws will cover your asses - Bambu Lab EU is based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and German customer protection laws goes beyond EU rules and applies to you.
I am currently working with three other enthusiasts, one being a lawyer -working in a different field, though- to clarify our options and will also talk to a customer protection agency.
Short explanation:
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German customer protection laws enable the customer of any online shop to “check” the sold product for 14d in a way they would check the product at a real world shop. The feature set and sales claims provided at this time do provide the base for finalization of the sale.
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The seller (!= Manufacturer!) has to provide a warranty for two years - for 6 months the burden of prove that the fault was not present at the delivery falls towards the seller, for the remaining time to the buyer. As BL does communicate the chanhe openly this is not an issue.
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BL furthermore claims that some uses fall outside the “intended use”. This is completely irrelevant - that is only relevant if they claim that they cannot provide warranty due to use outside the intended use. They still cannot reduce the feature set.
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Which holds more merit is the claim of BL that they are reducing a side feature/unintended feature. This explanation has, in the past, been used a few times in court successfully,but lately it has not been accepted anymore - even App connections for cars have been deemed a “base feature” that might play a significant role in choosing a car. It especially has not merit in cases when this defence is used to force a user to give up their (sensitive) data.
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BL also has a five year update policy in their TOS (which is mostly invalid otherwise,though) - and blocking users from updating if they don’t want to loose features and give up data is also very likely a breach of contract.
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There are also GDPR and market law implications that need to be considered.
What does that all mean? What can happen in the end?
It is highly unlikely that this proceedings can change the course of BL - these companies don’t give a fuck. But it might force them to basically reverse the sale (you would need to pay them for the actual use, though - but that is miniscule). Of course BL can also close their office in the EU and try to only sell from outside the EU - but that will put a very large crosshair on their back in terms of customs and taxes.
I keep you updated.
Update 21/01/25 Spoke with a customer protection associations lawyer for a short time, the longer answer will follow later. Few key facts:
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The fact that you once could use external tools and control while using cloud connection as well and soon cannot do this anymore is a relevant feature change, that it might affect the base of the sale. Developer mode is not a full replacement for that.
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There are some other issues with Bambu Lab policies, especially their return policies, that will be looked into as they directly contradict German law.
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thank you for making me aware of this, and thank fuck for louis rossman. no idea how we deserve that guy. as a new BL printer owner, I just opened a complaint on their websites support portal, as advised by this reddit post
Well this is… disappointing. I picked up an A1 at the end of last year because it “just works”, and I was tired of fighting my Ender 3 instead of actually printing with it. I’m extraordinarily happy with the quality of the printer itself, but I’ll be refraining from updating the firmware I guess, as I don’t allow it to use cloud services, and it lives on my LAN as the only means of management.
Prusa for the win yet again. I recently upgraded to MK4, and the thing just keeps. On. Going. Great customer support. They work with 3rd party suppiers instead of against them. Worth every cent.
I had a side gig as the printer mechanic for a small company that 3D printed bracketry for their product. They used both genuine and “knockoff” (open source ftw) Prusa Mk3s. I’d kinda like to staple Josef Prusa’s foreskin to the ceiling. I think it would make him have better ideas than the extruder-and-hot-end-assembly that those machines currently have. Deal breaking issues I’ve had with them in service:
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Nothing is connectorized at the business end. If you need to replace either of the two fans, the extruder motor, the PINDA probe, the temperature sensor, the heater cartridge, you have to partially disassemble the extruder mechanism and unwrap the wiring harness. The filament runout sensor is connectorized at the tiny little board, but…
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The wiring harness passes through a hole in the back of the carriage plate and most of the wires have to fit into one of two little slots as the extruder mechanism is attached to the carriage. It’s really easy to pinch or sever wires like this, and it means you can’t replace a broken fan or something without partial disassembly.
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The PINDA probe mount is about 3 planck lengths thick. It’s subject to some load from the thickness of the PINDA probe’s cable, it’s rather near the hot end and the heat plate, so I’ve seen them warp or break under continuous use. And it’s built into a foundational part of the mechanism so it’s not a quick swap, it’s a 100% teardown and rebuild from scratch.
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The whole thing is a demented sandwich with like 25 printed plastic parts. It’s a convoluted thing to work on, even if it’s not printed in gloss black so you can make out the shape of everything. But they print it in gloss black.
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It’s not designed to be built up as an assembly that can be easily and quickly attached and detached from the printer. In service, this makes it impossible to have a spare extruder assembly built up so when you get “Number 3 needs a new nozzle” you can swap in the spare assembly, return the machine to service, and then work on the part at your leisure. No, the production manager is breathing down your neck with a machine in many pieces. Hand me my stapler, I just want to talk to him.
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Those goddamn pressed in square nuts. If you want to re-use the hardware because one of the many plastic pieces partially broke in a way that means you HAVE to replace it, re-using the hardware is just one more jumper cable to the cornea.
It’s not specific to the Extruder mechanism, but because nothing is connectorized at the business end, you end up having to open the main board’s enclosure and dealing with shit in there, and there isn’t room. It’s turned the wrong way; the connectors and shit should be on the OUTSIDE of the printer so you could get to them easier and most of the cover should hinge or bolt off.
For an 8-bit AVR-based Mendel pattern machine they work surprisingly well when they’re in good shape but they are a PAIN IN THE TAINT to keep running in a production environment. I have the skills to do better than this but I’m not doing it for free.
Ouchie. OK, I get all that, not gonna argue.
But I’m in a completely different position as a hobbyist, I have completely different criteria.
Thanks for sharing!
Some of this I think still goes for hobbyists if they plan to buy the printer as a kit. The first (of like, eight) Prusas I built I had a hell of a time assembling the extruder mech because it’s not designed to be easy or sane to assemble, I still pinched wires, not bad enough to break anything but still. And I had built several 3D printers and a couple laser engravers prior to this.
And that PINDA probe mount is still hilariously delicate.
As a hobbyist machine that will spend most of its time powered off, they’re fine. For their gantry mechanism and the 8-bit control board, they’re surprisingly high quality if slightly slow printers.
Oh there’s another thing: The Prusa community is in the bad habit of sharing G-Code rather than STLs, because everyone everywhere has the same printer, right?
My personal printer is still my first manually leveled Folger 2020 i3 with some customization of mine, and I don’t need another.
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Leopards ate your face. May open source thrive
They’re run by a bunch of former DJI execs, the spy drone company.
Yeah that’s what kept me off Bambu printers right off the bat when I started looking at brands I’d want to get months ago.
In another thread on this enshittification, someone pointed out a similiar enclosed CoreXY brand, Qidi, that just runs FOSS Klipper. Looked very comparable, with the upcoming generation looking to have an AMS-like multifilament feeder.
Seems like most of the models include a chamber heater for better prints, especially on ABS which I’d given up on without a heater. Comes with brass nozzle for regular filaments, and a steel nozzle for CF filaments. This has replaced the Bambu on my wishlist.
https://qidi3d.com/products/qidi-x-max-3
Owner testimonial: https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/comment/14514530
I have a Qidi Q1 Pro and I’m pretty happy with it. Very fast precise prints and pretty reliable. There’s definitely some strange design decisions and weird quirks to it and Bambu machines feel way more polished. Overall I’d definitely recommend the Qidi machines but they are not quite as simple for people with no 3d printing experience. They are very feature rich and amazing printers for the price.
What would you say are the quirks? I come from building my own printers for the last 15 years, so I’d say I’m fairly experienced.
What are the interesting features?
Weirdness: The default g-code for the machine does silly things like park the nozzle over the build plate letting it ooze, instead of over the nozzle wiper/waste container.
The filament change routine is strange, requiring you to remove the bowden tube to cut the filament every time. This is easily fixed by printing a filament cutter and using that to cut the filament.
The bowden tube rubs against the top plexiglass lid for the machine, requiring you to print a riser for the lid to avoid it getting all scratched up.
The door for the machine is an odd shape design with no handle making it a little annoying to get a grip to open it.
The filament holder they include is a very bad design, flexes heavily with a full roll of filament and I have had spools fall off several times while printing.
The touch screen menu isn’t very intuitive and it can be very laggy at times.
Good features for the price point: Fully enclosed with built in chamber heater.
Pretty decent auto leveling system.
Timelapse camera.
Runs klipper/mainsail and input shaping is pretty cool.
I have around 500 hours on mine and I haven’t had any prints fail that were the fault of the machine so I’m pretty impressed by that. And I find the features and capabilities to be pretty great for the price point. They just could use to do some polishing of the design
I bought one based on this thread, but only set it up a few days ago.
Two days ago, my five-year-old requested that I print them a cat. I downloaded two cat models, one that was print-in-place bendy and one that was meant to test your calibration. I tried to print both, but both of them caused the printer to hang after displaying "stop processing, please wait … "
I spent several hours testing and troubleshooting this, only to find an old thread saying that the printer firmware can’t handle filenames between 6-9 characters (not including the extension), meaning the filenames could be 5 characters or fewer; or 10 or more. I had named my files
calicat.gcodeandflexicat.gcode. After adjusting them to be longer filenames, everything started working beautifully.I’m very happy with the printer now that I know that, but it seems such a random error that it was very frustrating to try to fix. I thought my printer arrived broken. Hopefully if someone else encounters the same problem, they find this post and it fixes their problems!
I have never actually tried printing off the device itself, the touch screen is very confusing. I always submit print jobs over the network via OrcaSlicer. But yes, that is exactly the kind of thing I meant when I said it has some odd quirks.
I think my first print was with the touch screen.
I printed a few things by sending directly from the Qidi slicer that came with it, but it pretty consistently is crashing at 40-80% when connecting through the network. I’ve been using the web interface directly and that’s going pretty well.
I wonder how easy would it be to swap the controller for something more open like the BTT boards? That way you’d get the nice design and an open platform. I’m not sure how much of their wiring could be repurposed for this though.
The controller, at least in the A1 and A1 mini, is an ESP chip. Probably an ESP32S3. You don’t need to swap any hardware, just open it up and find its UART pins to flash it.
(I know they’re ESPs because the device name shows up as espressif on my router)
That doesn’t mean it’s the board actually controlling the printer though. It could just be used as an interface component because they’re easy to use as the middle-man on network connected devices.
I am fairly sure it’s what is controlling the printer.
Looking at the board, I think you’re right but it’s definitely a custom board so exposing the UART might be fairly difficult.
Although it looks like it wouldn’t do much good (no klipper support for esp32)
You’d be surprised how often the UART is already exposed for factory programming.
As well, what I gathered from that thread is that they aren’t supported, because it’s a bit of overhead, and because they aren’t supported no one makes ESP32 printer boards. I think if suddenly a whole bunch of folks with A1s wanted to replace the firmware that might be a good userbase to add support for?
Maybe, maybe not it’s hard to say. I think most BL printer owners don’t really care or don’t want to mess with soldering tiny wires to tiny pads on their board and mess with flashing the device. The people buying these are generally not the tech-fiddling type.
I’m the tech-fiddling type and I bought one, my housemate is the tech-fiddling type and she bought one, our friend is the tech-fiddling type and she bought one. We all bought them because we wanted to spend our tech-fiddling time on the projects themselves and not on the printer.
I’m very glad I didn’t buy one of their printers. The RFID tag thing was enough to keep me from buying anything from them. This is even worse.
The RFID tag thing was enough to keep me from buying anything from them
Why?
Its the start of exactly the kind of thing that inkjet printers are doing with DRM in their cartridges.
RFID-identifying rolls of filament is a good thing. I would like that very much. I can’t count the number of times I loaded the wrong roll and printed with the wrong material on our Prusa Mk4. Not to mention, I would like that the printed warned me if the roll I’ve loaded doesn’t contain enough filament to complete the print I’m about to start.
What I really would have a beef against is the printer refusing to print with anything that isn’t RFID-tagged from Bambu.
But to my knowledge, Bambu printers don’t do that. They don’t prevent you from using generic rolls do they?
Not yet anyway, but considering what a shit company Bambu Lab is, they certain could and probably will at some point. Still, for the time being, they don’t.
Is your concern the fact that they could suddenly lock Bambu printers to Bambu-approved filaments?
What if Prusa implemented RFID roll identification? Would you feel the same way?
The Problem with the RFID wasnt that is was tagged, but that the Codes of the RFID Chips werent publicly availible to write onto any spool Filament that has RFID in it.
What if Prusa implemented RFID roll identification?
Yes of course. Any machine that has DRM on it and has the ability to kill itself when its company demands, is a piece of worthless junk.
RFID isn’t DRM. But let’s overlook that.
So the trustworthiness of the company implementing RFID doesn’t matter at all to you?
There are no trustworthy companies… The whole point of a company is to act in its own best interest. If they can sell you something that they can later utilize to extract money from you, then they will do it.
This is a risk with any item that requires software to function. Companies can change software licensees, lock-in buyers, and even open source can flat out abandon a project.
I just bought a Bambu Mini to sit along side my trusty 6 year old Mk3s+ and this pisses me off to no end. I was expecting my mini to simply be abandoned rather than suffer a lock-in AND then abandonment. So, I guess I won’t be updating my firmware nor will I run anything through their cloud. I was thinking of uploading a few designs to their cloud. But that ain’t going to happen now.
To comment on one of your points, something that gets lost when people learn about open source (at least most traditional licenses): nobody can change the license of something that was released so you have the option to fix it yourself or hire someone else to do it for you. While it’s incredibly powerful thing to have, many people only look at open source as “free (as in beer) stuff with free support”. Thing is, even if there’s no chance in earth you’ll fix it yourself, it’s likely someone out there who’s in the same situation will do it and make available for others. Key here is having popular and open enough hardware that people can replace or the software completely or keep its development (if open).
As open source printers go, you can always use the parts to convert it to a different printer but that requires tinkering. Perhaps this move will piss off enough some Bambu users that they’ll make the switch away from the “I just want something that works” mindset into tinkers.
There are licenses can be changed. Even you admit it.
This is a risk with any item that requires software to function.
Absolutely not true, it’s only a risk on products with cloud dependencies. Which is exactly why I ensure every electronic device I own doesn’t have that.
There’s an open source firmware for the X1
Wish there was a version for the A1… Regretting my blackfriday purchase…
Installing right now.
I originally had thought, “I mean I always have that option”. Now it’s clear that option may disappear at any time.
And done. Seems their servers are overloaded. The unlock confirmation page looped for a while til it finally let me through to choose my printer and unlock it.
Also, just fyi. https://www.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/comments/1h2wa56/send_files_from_orcaslicer_without_network_plugin/ Pandaprint is a nice shim that allows ditching the Bambu Labs network plugin in orcaslicer. Planning to review and then stand this up tonight.
I’m still on an ender 3
Well, I don’t own my own printer yet, and I plan on buying Prusa because they’re (still mostly) open-source and respect the user, even though every Tom, Dick and Harry tells me to get a Bambu printer because they’re three times cheaper and better.
This is why I won’t get a Bambu printer.
They’re not open source anymore. You can’t be mostly open source, you either are or are not.
IMO they started exactly the same path Bambu goes (though Bambu has a great head start).
I admit this is speculation, but I got the impression that Prusa is moving away from open source because they’re salty about other companies cloning their products and selling them much cheaper than the “original” parts. Proprietary parts, patents, etc. is of course worse for the user than a fully open ecosystem, but he isn’t necessarily going full anti-consumer.
I mean, you either can afford Prusa or you can’t. A Chinese fake Prusa knockoff is in no way interesting to people who want and expect the Prusa quality (though I haven’t had much luck with the fabled quality myself, the printer needed fixing multiple times). And people who can’t afford a Prusa are not a potential customer anyway. So cheap knockoffs are not stealing any customers.
Bambu is who’s stealing Prusa’s customers en masse and Prusa decided that they’re gonna slowly lock down their ecosystem while benefiting from years of open source by other people and projects. Which is, ironically enough, their stated reason for locking their ecosystem - people benefiting from their open source work while being closed.
The most common reasons to buy Prusa that I have heard are their 24/7 support, warranty and wanting to support a European company. I’m not entirely up to date with Chinese manufacturers, so things could have changed, but at least in the past Fysetc, Blurolls and even Trianglelab seemed to be on par, or even exceeding, Prusa quality for printers and parts.
If you were buying Bambu you already didn’t care about this
You would think that everybody owning a 3D printer would at least be somewhat of a tinkerer and therefore oppose this. Looking around however I’ve already seen a frustrating amount of people ridiculing the people calling this out. You’re probably right though and the people who don’t care will probably mostly have gathered around Bambu.
The whole point of bambu was that it was a 3d printer for people who didn’t want to tinker.
The people on this sub assume everyone who buys products do a ton of research on the companies making those products instead of just watching a couple reviews.
Most people are not as informed as those that appear in a dedicated 3d printing sub.
I care. I bought Bambu anyway, because there’s a LAN only option. I enabled it today. I am also not going to upgrade firmware.
there’s a LAN only option. I enabled it today.
Do you trust it to not “phone home” anyway?
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I can’t believe nobody saw this coming.
Jesus guys what did u expect.
