C’mon Bambu Labs. We get your game, you want to control the user experience from your precious cloud. But you realized your mistake and acquiesced early on in providing LAN-only mode. Please do the same for the USB port. We’re grateful for the power port but be honest, it’s more than just for power and you know it, update the firmware and give us USB access to the printer rather than solely over the LAN and cloud. This missing feature is egregious.
Yes - An active USB Port should definitely be a feature.
No - It would not serve a purpose for my use-case
I didn’t even know there was a USB port on the control board.
Let’s assume for the sake of common sense that no Electrical engineer would design a microcontroller based device where the USB port was strictly for power. That would be designs stupidity on on the order of placing a screen door on a submarine or placing a milk bucket under a bull.
Are you sure? The USB is typically supported off the data pins. In fact there’s a whole Arduino library to support this function. I’ve seen examples of others too.
You got me curious though and I have a couple of ESP32’s that I’ll get around to unwrapping and try it out for myself.
Either way, I cannot conceive of a use-case where one would simply put USB on the board simply for power, That would be better served coming of the controller board.
ESP32-S3 has native USB, does not need FTDI chip. So it would be surprising if D+/D- from the microcontroller are not routed to the mentioned USB port.
Well, plug up some usb device that is a power and data hog and report back what the reslts of your test were. I bought a gadget on Amazon that you plug in-line that will give you current draw and voltage. Effectively a multimeter for USB.Get one of those, maybe a Raspberry Pi 5 powered off that socket would be a good test. Stubby data cable to multimeter, longer data cable to a Pi and do some process that will load up the Pi
If i cannot get my P1S print from USB cable without the need to connect to CPP controlled servers, i am not buying this garbage ever again and i will tell all my followers NOT TO BUY ANYTHING from this shady company that changes its terms AFTER you purchase the product.
That should be illegal.
Worst case - unless the pins are used for something else - would be wiring up a USB-to-serial adapter… but that would still require that the firmware support being able to upload firmware via a serial transfer…
I was somewhat surprised that USB connectivity was essentially omitted… the reliability of a direct connection really can’t be beat for simplicity and ease of setup… imagine simply being able to plug your computer (or even phone, using a USB-OTG adapter) into the printer, and have it auto-magically configure itself to Bambu account, wifi, as well as recovery firmware updates, and then also be available for direct to printer printing. But I accepted it given it’s primary focus on cloud printing, given the SD card is still there for direct printing.
To answer your question, no, there hasn’t been any further development on this. However, since this post, there appears to be inconclusive evidence that Bambu never connected the data lines of the USB connector, which would make this a power-only port. Somehow, I can’t see a reason why a company would choose not to connect the data pins since it costs nothing to do so, and whether or not that functionality is ever implemented in the firmware can be decided at a later date.
That does suck. I don’t see a reason either from a consumer standpoint as to why they wouldn’t be. I’ve got many tabs open looking at way to make the P1S standalone since reading the FW announcement. I’ve only owned the machine for 3 months and love it but sad to see the company making a decision like this.
