Hi,
Perhaps I missed something, but to me the filament management is just purely catastrophic, awful to use.
I own more than 150 spools of different filaments, and having nearly all of them listed in a drop down list is just a nightmare.
Impossible to sort them, to group them by brand, type, color, filter them, etc…
This damn awful drop down list make me crazy.
Please do something pleasant to use for people owning quite a lot of spools and creating print profile for each one.
Thanks
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Found this when googling for workarounds to my current nightmare, and had to comment.
It’s actually nauseating how bad filament profile management is - doubly so in combination with the AMS. It’s particularly frustrating when all hardware is there for a really slick solution.
If they cleaned up the UX (which is absolutely apallingly bad, kludgy and broken beyond any reasonable excuse), and sold RFID spool tags for associating with custom settings - it could be a real dream.
Load unassociated RFID → create custom profile & associate → AMS reads from RFID or manual setting → slicer selection not present in AMS gives warning rather than just printing whatever it damn well pleases. chefs kiss
Instead we get garbage, and crippled hardware features so that they can try and make a few extra bucks on their filament markup (they don’t even make their own filament).
Right now my AMS reads one spool as “PHA” (HOW? I thought the AMS didn’t load custom profiles?) - when clicking edit it instead says “Generic PLA” - and even though I sliced with a custom PLA profile related to AMS slot 2, it chose to instead print from A3 (which mercifully was also PLA, but I don’t know how it made the choice it did, so it could have just as easily been the neighboring PAHT-CF, which would have really pissed me off). Trying to clean things up in the “cloud” is impossible - there’s no GUI for it, and one has to derp around through the desktop UI and click the stupid little “x” next to the save icon.
For the life of me I can’t get the AMS not to read “PHA” for slot 2, unless I choose anything but “Generic PLA” - but “Generic PLA” in any other slot just reads “PLA”.
Bambu is raking in cash by the bucketload - but I think they’ve outsourced their software development to the local meth head…
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Although I have had fantastic experiences in my interactions here with a number of different Bambu people, especially on GitHub, I did LOL hard at this last ‘meth’ bit. I think a lot (for me) is I am only 2 months into 3D Printing, using slicers, design tools etc, so a lot of my assumptions are wrong… but I tend to agree, the whole custom\filament thing is another level struggle on top of that.
That being said, they are looking for tallented C++ and UX designers, so hey, if you know anyone… they are keen to improve with added talent.
I would hazard a guess is its tied to some of other original slicer design cues - that now breaking away and modifing instead of plan , design, build from the ground up … is causing some …detours from sensible workflow and UX issues
The way the filament database and AMS design works as well, is well limiting to say the least. Eg AMS ‘slot’ only knows a about a master\parent Filment ID - so any preset or clones of that original filament, with slighly different prices, temps, any other factors - still has the parent Filament ID - so the AMS just sees and reports back the original master filment name… thus the annoying resync looses preset… and the reason why we havve ssuch a long list of different filament ‘names’ in the drop down, the parent and its presets duplicating a lot.
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Heh, I’m glad the humor came across.
I’m surely being unduly harsh, but this era of “maximize profits, rush out alpha quality as final release, ‘what is polish?’, everything’s broken in the most absurd ways and we all just make due” is getting to me. Seems every time I turn around I’m paying far too much hard-earned, inflation-eroded money for clunky “sorta works” ■■■■ that wouldn’t fly just a decade or two past. In this case I’m taking it out on Bambu because it’s spent all day slapping me in the face, additionally fueled by the reddit fanboys attempting to castrate anyone who dares question Bambu supremecy within r/BambuLab/…
The product is good, and really the whole ecosystem could be incredible if they weren’t trying to squeeze every penny out of it. I’d honestly pay double the cost of my P1S if it meant they’d open up the firmware. Sooner or later it’ll probably be cracked anyway, might as well generate a loyal userbase and huge marketshare by focusing on people over profits. The whole world seems to have forgotten that you can make good money on a good product without sacrificing employees or customers - you just can’t make “the most” profit…
Instead they rush out broken, kludgy code and intentionally cripple HW capabilities in the name of maximizing profit (FW locking bed temp on the P1S, Bambu-only NFC, etc…)
I’ve probably spent $3K in the Bambu store over the past six months - and while I’m impressed with the hardware itself, the overall user experience leaves me with more regrets than satisfaction - and I’m clearly not alone - and that should matter. Alas, as far as I can tell - it doesn’t (and I have the unresolved-yet-closed CS tickets to prove it).
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.