At least from what I’ve seen, the people who want to tinker with their machines are self-reliant and exactly the kind of people who don’t turn to customer service to solve their problems. Just sayin.
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I am new to 3D printing and have experienced many of the issues you address. If many of your suggestions had been implemented a year ago many hours of frustration would not have occurred.
While I can save the gcode to a card and walk it to the printer, why should I have to? Both are connected to my WiFi network. Why can’t I send it across that network without it going through the internet?
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You can. It’s called LAN mode.
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“Customer Service nonexistent “ someone said. It may seem like that is the case and for very good reason and it does not matter if it happens to a few across the customer base, those not early adopters or YouTube influencers.
A person buying an X1C for personal or business (should not matter) and it having a serious malfunction after a few days could happen with any product, I guess. But that person waiting weeks for a CS response is unacceptable.
They market the product with customer service and a one year warranty. Many people spent the money because of those benefit’s and were willing to pay for them. How many people have open tickets for a printer that is unusable and the warranty will run out by the time support may respond?
I am not one of these users and hopefully will not be one. I completely understand their frustrations. The first image of a company and its products usually sticks, or it takes x2 to x4 times the effort to win them back before a competitor does. Since they don’t exclude commercial operation of the printer from the warranty, I assume. That costs the business money every minute the printer is down.
Now some people may be extremely patient, look to buy the parts out of pocket and fixing it themselves, or new to printing and looking towards the “out of the box” printer company to fix the out of the box problems. All within a reasonable amount of time.
As a western consumer, I don’t think that expecting what was sold to them exists and follows their SLA (service level agreement, like response time) is too much to ask.
Each disappointed customer can influence many potential customers, schools and businesses.
Honestly the network connection process and policy doesn’t bother me. And these printers are so amazing/disruptive to the 3d printing market that I can fully understand the desire to keep everything as proprietary as possible.
Frankly, the same users of these products who want Bambu to make everything opensource are the same people who get really angry that a design they shared on Thingiverse gets stolen and sold on Etsy. Having been a victim of this myself, I have nothing but respect and understanding for Bambu wanting to protect their own IP - meanwhile they have shown their willingness to evolve their approach by allowing for custom firmware etc. I find it a happy medium given what these printers have done for my business.
My biggest gripe personally is the lack of ability to detect tangled or hung filament - at least on P series printers… This isn’t a brand issue, all filament is subject to tangles or getting hung up on the spool. But these printers keep on printing ruining so many of my prints and wasting so much time. It’s absurdly easy to monitor the current use from the extruder gear and you could calibrate an error for it - or if that isn’t an option it’d be absurdly easy to have an accessory that goes along the PTFE tube that just rolls on the filament with a hall sensor on it that would detect when the filament speed is slower than the extruder speed. But there’s nothing. On a printer that fixes so many more difficult problems in 3d printing with incredibly sophisticated methods it’s astounding that one of the most basic failures is left to chance.
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I would agree with you. I bought it cause I don’t like my creality Enders cause all the tinkering and messing with it with wasted spools to still have sub par prints. Within an hour of the printer arriving I was greeting with a loud noise and an error. Moto b failed. Still waiting on ticket resolution and now have to “tinker” with it to install a motor I am not comfortable with doing. And haven’t been able to even use the printer for roughly two weeks. ( that’s when it arrived ) I wanted out of the box printing. I got out of the box dead printer. Waiting on support. Waiting on them to ship a motor. Still hasn’t arrived. And the anxiety of tearing it apart to replace a motor. And praying I don’t loose a screw. Misplace something or break something else.
I use creality printers all the time. I help the middle school with their 3d print club. Had them convince to get rid of the cr20’s and get these. After this ordeal and a meeting with the school board. That is no longer going to happen. So that’s at least 10 printers for the middle and 10 for the high school Bambu lost.
I can walk 100yds to my man cave, pick up the SD in the rain, walk to my PC or laptop, write to the SD, walk another 100yds in the rain, put the SD back in and start the print. I’m cold and wet and now unhappy.
Then I could use my fibre LAN to the shed to push the image to the printer. I can do that with my 2.5 mini cnc mill, I can see what it’s doing and even control it in real time. I can also do the same with my cnc mini lathe.
What is stopping you from transferring your files via LAN to your Bambu printer?
Not much Jon, just pointing out that sneaker net actions using an SD are not really a viable option unless you are right next to the printer. I did use that for a while with an FLSun QQS Pro, it was very painful. I switched out to controlling it via octoprint. In terms of information, control and extendibility of functions it doesn’t come anywhere near octoprint which I do miss. Spaghetti detection was great and it pains me to say before I eventually tuned in reliability quite a necessary add on.
The functionality on Bambu in LAN mode has increased and is much improved from the time when I started using the P1S I have. Updates being an exception.
Home assistant does give a nice front end to the bambu printer series which I might look at as I do have an instance running my UPS (solar & 9kWH battery)
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