3DPrinting

Voron. Make a Voron.

I own a BambuLab A1M as I want a printer that just works. And while yes it is all proprietary they do sell replacement parts for most parts.

While I will not forgive them for their latest moves I am quite happy, I turn it on, load an stl into BambuStudio and let it run without any issues at all.

My next printer will however probably be a prusa as they are Europeans and I love that they keep everything up to the user so far. But I can not deal with anything that is more DIY than a Prusa, it is a tool for my hobby...not the hobby itself.

I have a Bambu P1S with an AMS after years of using a Ender 3 that was modified to high heavens both on hardware and on firmware level. It is a perfectly fine product and the AMS makes filament changes so much easier, it is a convenience that I personally love. My P1S is running in LAN mode and it works perfectly fine in combination with OrcaSlicer on my Linux machine. No data is send to the Bambu Cloud, everything is local.

Would I like the possibility to have a custom firmware on it? Sure, I always like options. But to be honest: My P1S runs better, smother, faster then my Ender 3 with his many mods and custom firmware ever did.

Is Bambu on my list of manufacturers for another printer purchase? Yes, but near the end after their anti consumer behavior lately.

Despite this, they still receive glowing reviews, even from tech-savvy communities.

I mean, most people don't care. How often do you see mainstream smartphone reviewers making a single mention of the insane amount of bloatware and spyware on phones, or calling out Apple for their unrepairable devices? Shit just blows over eventually and consumers accept it for what it is. 3D printers are not exempt from this mentality.

Jeff Geerling made a video today about how he bought a dishwasher that was top-rated by ~~RTINGS~~ Consumer Reports with no mention of the fact that in order to make it do a God damn thing, you have to connect it to the app, create an account, and connect it to them OEM's cloud.

Several years ago I bought a DJI action cam and it was the same thing. You can't do jack shit with it without connecting it to an app and creating an account. I watched dozens of reviews and this was never mentioned. I returned it but I'm sure 99.9% either don't give a fuck or accepted it.

• this is what going mainstream looks like. Greedy people see profit and they get in.
• greedy people are often sneaky, and they work to take all the can from open and close it in : Apple, Later Redhat
• there are tons of Open Open printers out there
• Open has a problem - it's hard to maintain ignorance and get the benefit. It requires work - you can't just easily trade dollars for someone else's labor. You have to learn and put things together to really enjoy.
• What can you do?

  • This is hard, almost impossible: Don't do business with people you suspect or know are cruddy. Even if they say they have what you want.

  • Learn how to build the printer you want. Hire a good person to learn and do it for you.

  • Buy a printer from a company that pledges to do right. Even if it costs more.

Holy shit. There is so much gatekeeping here that Cerberus themselves would say "Yo dog, take it down a notch"

I think there are two big aspects to this.

The first is that, yes, we are seeing a big push toward locked down ecosystems. Bambu is a great example of this and people are still falling all over each other to talk about how amazing their products are. And, as someone who has been pointing out that AMSes don't actually do what people think they do for years now, it has been frustrating to watch them take over the cultural zeitgeist even before the current bullshit.

Which leads into the second aspect. FDM printing is very much a "prosumer" hobby. It is about taking industrial/corporate processes and marketing them to hobbyists. Some of that is awesome because it provides a platform to rapidly prototype and iterate on new tech (which benefits the companies more than the users but...) and some of that is miserable because it means we have astroturfing campaigns out there to explain to people why they NEED 24 AMSes chained together for their single printer... because that model works a lot better for print farms.

And, as an aside before I get to the "real" point: We see the same with home cooking. There was a MASSIVE push that everyone should sous vide everything for a couple years. And.. that was mostly because we had restaurant chefs talking to The Masses without a Food Network/PBS producer telling them to shut up. So OBVIOUSLY the best steak you will ever eat is the one that spent 11 hours in a hot water bath and was quickly seared to be plated in under 5 minutes. Rather than the understanding that this is a crutch used because a line cook can't spend 10 minutes butter basting their steak.

And most of that still is incredibly obnoxious and outright wasteful. But it also led to people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt who used that to popularize "reverse sear" cooking.

So, now to the real point. People are gate keeping mother fuckers. They are angry that they had to read twelve different articles to figure out what "the paper trick" was rather than having a printer having an automatic tool that kind of gets you... probably closer than you would have gotten anyway. And countless other pain points that were resolved because... they were pain points.

And people decide THEY are heroes and legends rather than realizing that people like Naomi Wu et al came before them and got it to the point where it was learnable for the hobbyist sickos.

Which... not to shit on the OP TOO much (I would not be surprised if this came out of the LLM pass) but it is why I more than side eye anything that has "Make them great (again)". Because, invariably, it is a case of people yearning for a time that never actually existed where they are on top and everyone bows before them.

Some people want to 3d print for a hobby, while some want 3d printers as a hobby. You are the second type, while out of the box printers are for the first type.

Personally what kept me away from 3d printing my own terrain for miniature wargames is that I don't have time for another hobby. I just can't be bothered with endless fiddling with settings, temperatures, speed, and all that. But I understand your feelings

Btw most would rather read your own writing rather an ai. When my students edit with ai it’s typically pretty obvious and I think it wastes everyone’s time. Also, foreign students frequently write much better than the native English ones at my school, idk why. I bet your writing is better than you think :)

Free systems were expensive, hard to use, and had worse finish

Bambu came, made a better [proprietary] product

People obviously bought it

Then other manufacturers saw that they could sell proprietary products just as well and jumped into the bandwagon