For many of us, Quality is the main requirement in a 3D Printer and your printers have been an excellent product in the Quality/Price category. I don’t mind the locked down printer parts because replacements are affordable and readily available.
However, second to a printer’s Quality is Freedom. The freedom to design, print and test things in our own homes, to do things our way. I didn’t mind connecting to your Bambu Cloud services because it was convenient and didn’t remove any Freedom I had in the control of my printer. This arbitrary lockdown will remove the perceived value of my Freedom/Choice for no discernable benefit (to us.)
Whatever you decide with Authorization changes, it no longer matters to me. I will be switching my printer to LAN mode and blocking its access to the internet. As for buying more Bambu Printers in the future… I will wait until someone releases open source firmware before making any of your Bambu Printers → mine.
This is not an improvement. This is not increasing security. This is unwanted lockdown taking away control over the device on the local area network from the user, making it reliant on the manufacturer’s mercy.
This allows the manufacturer to charge additional money, e.g., if you want to integrate your printer into a print farm management system. It enforces users to use a proprietary application from the manufacturer on their PC, which may or may not be available for all operating systems.
This is reason enough not to buy nor recommend Bambu Lab printers anymore.
I’m a user you never would have heard of. I would have just kept using my printer and likely bought another one, as well as your consumable products.
This course of action forces me to become a voice of dissent in your community, and reconsider my purchase of both your printers and consumables.
Should a force of cloud services come into effect, I will have to reconsider if I even want to keep my Bambu printer, or replace it with another of whatever my second printer will be.
When one purchases a product, they are purchasing it as it is when they buy it. When you change how a product operates after it’s purchased, you are stealing functionality the customer has already paid you for. This is tantamount to theft.
thats not the “feedback” they wanted to read.
my printer is not gonna update this time. gonna use LAN ONLY from now till they fix this problem there are options to disconnect your printer from the internet and not you LAN. Bambuhandy is removed from my phone
All this talk about forced firmware and I can’t even get the beta version …
Seriously though, how does one get it? I joined the beta program in Bambu Handy per the wiki. Been sitting here for a couple of days waiting for the update to show up. Would really like to use it and give some honest feedback and to experience all this hubbub first hand.
“You are not worthy of my firmware. Only the chosen ones can use it”
Maybe they are keeping it on their side for now. Maybe there is a long waiting list (Press F to doubt). There could be many reasons.
But either way, send them a support ticket. Maybe you’ll get your answer since support is really communicative.
The “Join the Beta” in the Handy app will put you into the pool for when they release the public beta.
For the last couple hardware firmware beta releases Bambu has used a staged release.
Inhouse development
Private beta release - People who signed up via the forum and were selected. They are given access to a restricted forum area when issues and feedback is directly reviewed by Bambu developers.
Public beta release - People who opt in via the Handy App are sent the option to update to the public Beta.
Full release - Everyone
For what it is worth, currently there doesn’t seem to be anything testing in Private beta.
Wasn’t sure where to put this, since there’s no announcement page for Bambu Connect beta. I figure since we’re all lumping in all this stuff together (Bambu Studio, Bambu Connect, printer firmware), then maybe this might be the right place. Plus there hasn’t been a lot of talk about people actually using the software.
Here’s a breakdown of my experience with Bambu Connect. This is the only part I can really test since I’ve not received the beta firmware yet and Studio beta testing is pointless without the firmware. I’m probably missing stuff, but I’m tired and this is what you get.
Slicing and exporting the sliced 3mf and then importing works as described and demo’d.
Using the provided URL scheme bambu-connect://blahblahblah works as described. Running it starts up Bambu Connect with the loaded 3mf ready to import. Bambu Connect does not need to be running for this to work.
The basic printer controls work without issue. They can sometimes be slow to respond though.
Printing starts just fine with percentage and time displayed. Stop and Pause work.
Can add LAN only printers without logging in, so no credential authentication needed. Just need to providing printers access code.
Forgets about LAN only printers if you are not logged in to Bambu when you go to load the application again. Which means you have to reconnect your LAN only devices every time you load the application.
Will not load if internet is unavailable, just gets stuck trying to load. Digging a little deeper and it specifically fails if it can’t reach api.bambulab.com.
Does not have camera access. This is kind of a must if we are losing the controls from Orca and HA. LAN only would completely lose this feature.
No SD card access. Which means no access to timelapse’s or models outside of FTP or loading SD card into a computer. Doesn’t matter if connected via LAN only or not. Kind of expected for LAN only printers, but not for logged in ones.
Can only adjust filament type and color for AMS. Lose access to all other AMS and filament configurations.
Cannot make changes to printer settings; Change nozzle size or Print Options.
Forgets windows size and location. Have to resize to see cutoff controls each time application loads.
Manual calibrations from the Calibration tab in Orca cannot work since it tries to send the print without an option to export 3mf. Probably can be easily fixed, but figured I’d throw it out there.
When I first heard about this, I immediately had a very bad feeling this was going to block all third-party applications and devices (OrcaSlicer, Panda Touch, etc.). Also, the “hacker” thing is really dumb… Who would take the time to hack a 3D printer??? What would they do with it (what… print stuff?) It’s not like it’ll contribute in any way, the processor isn’t that good anyways. Anybody who has a local network in their home or anywhere where the devices are important, they are going to use WPA or at least some security to protect it. Never mind the fact that we bought these printers…
BBL is going to lose a lot of things if they do this.
Apologies for appearing thick here. I’m currently running the 1.10.2.64 Beta because of this exact issue, its now asking me to update to 1.10.2 Public Beta I cant afford to loose the click box for both horizontal and surface text again, am i ok to do this update.
