Random 3D printing chatter

b0rn2sk8 said:
It’s a bit of both, the printers are inherently insecure, the reaction to the being made more secure is massively overblown.

For your use case, you’ll probably not notice any difference. It’s only those who use un authenticated MQTT commands that seems to be impacted (e.g. home assistant, 3rd party controls etc.
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It also paves the way for them to add subscription based features if they wanted to
 
I suspect that if this does go ahead we will soon see non-official firmwares (like the X1 plus) that will disable talking to their cloud service but enable talking directly with 3rd party slicers like Orcaslicer.
 
jonneymendoza said:
It also paves the way for them to add subscription based features if they wanted to
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If those features are over and above what’s already there and what I paid for, I’m not sure I’d be too concerned.

BeelzebubUK said:
I suspect that if this does go ahead we will soon see non-official firmwares (like the X1 plus) that will disable talking to their cloud service but enable talking directly with 3rd party slicers like Orcaslicer.
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This. Well you can technically still use Orca slicer after the changes, you just have to export it to Bambu to print.

There are pros and cons to custom firmware and I find the cloud features useful so it’s not something I would do but I can see why others who say, have a huge print farm to manage would.

As a home hobby user with one printer for personal use, the changes Bambu are making don’t have any impact other than making the printer slightly more secure.
 
I'm still somewhat torn by how concerned I am with this Bambu situation. Initially I would have said Reddit was just massively overreacting - Bambu were doing a security update, and everyone would have complained if they *weren't* fixing known security updates. But the narrative seems to have changed with time since the original news broke. More and more concern from individuals over how locked down the devices may be with time, no updates from Bambu to reassure anyone, and then Reddit + Discord mods banning people who are critical about the decision - it doesn't paint a great picture.

For now I'm unaffected, but it has me concerned about going any further into the Bambu ecosystem just in case they suddenly do start putting new features behind a paywall, or blocking the AMS being able to use non-Bambu filament or similar.

I bought into Bambu ~2 months ago aware of the cloud nature. I'm questioning whether I really made the right move. Thing is, what are the alternatives? There is no off the shelf printer that can compete with the P1S+AMS combo at the price point, and doing a customer Voron build is a lot of work. Most of us bought a Bambu because we didn't want to faff around with the printer, but instead just print things.
 
PinkFloyd said:
I'm still somewhat torn by how concerned I am with this Bambu situation. Initially I would have said Reddit was just massively overreacting - Bambu were doing a security update, and everyone would have complained if they *weren't* fixing known security updates. But the narrative seems to have changed with time since the original news broke. More and more concern from individuals over how locked down the devices may be with time, no updates from Bambu to reassure anyone, and then Reddit + Discord mods banning people who are critical about the decision - it doesn't paint a great picture.

For now I'm unaffected, but it has me concerned about going any further into the Bambu ecosystem just in case they suddenly do start putting new features behind a paywall, or blocking the AMS being able to use non-Bambu filament or similar.

I bought into Bambu ~2 months ago aware of the cloud nature. I'm questioning whether I really made the right move. Thing is, what are the alternatives? There is no off the shelf printer that can compete with the P1S+AMS combo at the price point, and doing a customer Voron build is a lot of work. Most of us bought a Bambu because we didn't want to faff around with the printer, but instead just print things.
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It’s one thing locking down the cloud service and the merits of doing that.

It’s another thing to fundamentally changing how the product works and putting existing features like the AMS being a paywall or blocking the AMS from using 3rd party filament. Both would be rather stupid decisions that I doubt they would realistically survive….

When you say going further into the Bambu Ecosystem?
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
It’s one thing locking down the cloud service and the merits of doing that.

It’s another thing to fundamentally changing how the product works and putting existing features like the AMS being a paywall or blocking the AMS from using 3rd party filament. Both would be rather stupid decisions that I doubt they would realistically survive….

When you say going further into the Bambu Ecosystem?
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Agreed it would be a different level of change. But that's what all the fearmongering on Reddit appears to be, assuming that because Bambulabs have made this change that removes the unauthorised connectivity, that they'll then go straight on to doing the next step. There's already evidence they're bringing in some subscription services for print farm management. To us more savvy users, it would be pretty suicidal for Bambu to do - but I think they've got a high enough volume of non-techies using their printers now where they could get away with it?

As for getting further into the Bambu Ecosystem - thinking in terms of buying additional AMS, big collections of filament etc. I'm going to hold off giving Bambu any money right now until I see how this plays out a bit more. Nothing as extreme as some folks on reddit returning everything and raising formal complaints! Just applying a little caution.
 
Ok, so for a newbie like myself and daughter, this wont 'immediately' affect our printing journey, but its a possible ominous sign of Bambus future direction unless they're made to change it, so for now I'm thinking of still going ahead with an A1+AMS combo (non-Bambu filaments would really suck in future and would definitely make me jump brands, but how would the printer know, are there chips on each filament reel as per printer cartridges?)

So it sounds like Orca slicer wont be the way to go, so what other slicers do you use with a Bambulabs printer? Just the Bambulabs studio, but is that a pretty poor comparison to Orca or other slicers? And is a slicer program only needed for CAD designs you make yourself, which then need to be 'sliced' ready to send to the printer, and models you can download from other sites are ready to send straight off? Lots of learning for me as you can tell!
 
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Same here, I've seen chat of other slicers but I opened a few .stl files in Bambu Studio (not actually got my printer yet) and it, err opens the model and has settings and a 'print' button - Not sure what else is required for my usage :D
 
1pudding1 said:
Ok, so for a newbie like myself and daughter, this wont 'immediately' affect our printing journey, but its a possible ominous sign of Bambus future direction unless they're made to change it, so for now I'm thinking of still going ahead with an A1+AMS combo (non-Bambu filaments would really suck in future and would definitely make me jump brands, but how would the printer know, are there chips on each filament reel as per printer cartridges?)
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They have RDID tags in them which automatically program the slicer with the correct colour and print profiles for that filament and enable it to tell how much it has used off the spool by how quickly it is spinning. It then enables automatic switching when one roll runs out to another roll of the same colour/type if you have one loaded.

It’s only really for quality of life features as the selecting the filament profile can be manually done in the slicer and switching rolls can of course be done manually.

1pudding1 said:
So it sounds like Orca slicer wont be the way to go, so what other slicers do you use with a Bambulabs printer? Just the Bambulabs studio, but is that a pretty poor comparison to Orca or other slicers? And is a slicer program only needed for CAD designs you make yourself, which then need to be 'sliced' ready to send to the printer, and models you can download from other sites are ready to send straight off? Lots of learning for me as you can tell!
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Orca slicer and Bambi studio are forks of the same underlying software. You only need it to turn a CAD model into something that the printer understands.

Rob_B said:
Same here, I've seen chat of other slicers but I opened a few .stl files in Bambu Studio (not actually got my printer yet) and it, err opens the model and has settings and a 'print' button - Not sure what else is required for my usage :D
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Exactly, that’s 99% of what people use it for.
 
Thinking of other brands of 3D printers, like Creality and Flashforge, is this concern that Bambu are seemingly trying to address found on those as well.?
If so, I guess that insecure remote type connections have always been there.?
How much of a concern could this have the potential to be, if not addressed..?
 
Not sure if what you're getting at is exactly this but - and forgive me if I'm barking up the wrong tree - I've for a while been taking the stance that these more network'y devices that use remote services are not under my control or supervision. I don't control the firmware or what they do or when....and so they don't get on my main network, only on an untrusted guest network. Same for modern TVs with network/wifi connections. It's weirdly for this reason that I'm still using the Bambu cloud stuff because I've not poked the required holes between the two networks to enable LAN mode - that's assuming it'll work across routed subnets....although they mentioned VPN access so it ought to.
 
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