Hello, I’m a prospective customer for a 3D printer. I’m by no means anyone special, but I think it’s helpful that Bambu know where we’re coming from, and why they’re missing some (at least one) potential sale(s). I’ve never touched a Bambu printer, but I’ve seen a few in person.
Bambu printers are high quality, and well liked in the community. They are consistently well-done, quality products in a sea of printers where corners are cut in the name of a few cents.
Everyone knows this. So why isn’t the Bambu labs the next Ender (yet)? In my opinion, Ender’s edge comes in the fact that there is not a single proprietary part / software on a stock Ender 3, or 5. Because of this, there are hundreds of hardware mods for the Ender, tens of thousands of software contributions to the firmware, and has an entire ecosystem of makers working on additions, improvements, and mods for free. This, in my humble opinion, is the biggest separation between the two products.
An open API interface could be a small but important start towards garnering this sort of community. We aren’t looking for pristine libraries that are in every programming language imaginable. We’re looking for some simple documentation of API calls that we could write code around, and maybe an example of code performing a few of these calls.
I’ve seen the open source bambu-farm
project, and the API is there, and able to be called by 3rd parties, we just need the docs. I know there is a community of tinkerers and developers out there that are chomping at the bit to make free software for Bambu printers, it’s evident purely from the attempts that have been made thus far to reverse-engineer the protocols.
I urge those at Bambu labs to at lest consider making the API spec open, this is low hanging fruit in terms of methods to increase both community and reputation.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.