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Comment by bbielsa | Hacker News Reader

I own a Bambu P1S and Bambu does not deserve the benefit of the doubt in this case. The cloud (anti-)feature is entirely unnecessary and gives them free license to use all recordings from the webcam in the printer.

The printer has to be connected to the “cloud” in order to access the webcam, control the internal lights, and control the print head and heated bed from their Bambu app. However, part of the initial setup process requires you to connect to the printer via Bluetooth in order to setup the wifi connection in the first place! Clearly it IS possible to communicate with the printer without an internet connection.

They intentionally ruined the user experience in LAN-only mode to persuade people to connect their printers to the Bambu cloud service.

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Why on earth do 3D printers need a cloud connection, but most importantly why do people buy them?

Bambu had a pretty big marketing campaign with their printers. All the major reviewers/influencers in the 3d printing community were provided review samples, and presumably talking points to emphasize. Most all reviews focused on the high print speeds and advanced technology in the printers.

Things like the nearly required cloud integration were glossed over with "that's normal today and you get so many shiny features with it" and hardly anyone challenged Bambu by saying that most of the features enabled by cloud integration didn't really need the cloud to be implemented. Things like immature firmware were glossed over with comments like "there are some bugs but that can be fixed over time, so just go ahead and assume that this young company without a proven track record will provide good support to these printers."

Add the marketing to the consideration that there were no other pre-built "fast" printers when the Bambu printers hit the market. Your only other option was to build your own like a Voron, which many people didn't want to do. Now there are other pre-built options that don't require cloud integration, so people can really weigh the pros/cons of the other options, but Bambu got an advantage by being first to market.

What would you recommend as an alternative pre-built “fast” printer?

If cloud connectivity concerns you, the only pre-built option I’d recommend is Prusa. The mk4 isn’t as fast as Bambu’s printers, but that is a trade you will have decided on. I’d still put the mk4 in the “fast” category. The mk4 is completely open source. Prusa is the most reputable company in terms of trustworthiness.

This is completely wrong...

When the Bambu came out, there was nothing like it on the market that combined price, speed, and ease-of-use. Yes, there were cheaper printers, and faster printers, and easier-to-use printers, but not in a single package, and especially not in a pre-built package.

Things like immature firmware were glossed over

The "immature" firmware is still better than the "mature" firmware Creality ships. And Prusa shipped buggy firmware for its multi-material addon for several years, despite being in the 3d printing game for over a decade.

Bambu got an advantage by being first to market.

Bambu's first printer came out last year. The Anker Make came out before it. Creality and Prusa have been shipping 3d printers for a decade. Voron has been a thing for about a decade. What is this "first to market" advantage you speak of?

> When the Bambu came out, there was nothing like it on the market that combined price, speed, and ease-of-use. Yes, there were cheaper printers, and faster printers, and easier-to-use printers, but not in a single package, and especially not in a pre-built package.

are they hoping to monetise you in a future update?

continued use? $19.99/month

I'm not sure what you're getting at. There's no subscription cost for using the cloud update, and it's possible to control the printers over WiFi using open source slicers.

So it appears you're angry about a strawman that doesn't actually exist.

> There's no subscription cost for using the cloud update

... yet

Bambu X1 started shipping in July 2022 when their Kickstarter wrapped up. AnkerMake M5 started shipping in August. Bambu was first.

Voron is a kit or diy. Creality printers that were available at the time were not fast like the Bambu. Their K1 came later.

I wrote that at the time Bambu was the first to have a pre-built fast 3d printer. That is the first to market (the pre-built fast printer market) that I was talking about.

I don’t know how you say I was wrong, because everything you “corrected” me was in my previous post.

The main feature is being able to remotely check up on your 3D prints and cancel them if they've gone wrong as well as being able to print remotely. These are actually fairly useful which is why people do buy them, though you could make it work without cloud connections.

A lan connection and a raspberry pi will do that just fine. Plugin a webcam and the USB connector of the printer. Been doing this >10 years ago and i was able to upload print models, monitor progress, and cancel. Use USB hubs if you have more than one printer.

And then you also set up a VPN connection to your phone, mess with certificates and whatnot? Though you’ll also need to use some form of cloud system to get past CGNAT, since you probably have that on both ends. My ISP hasn’t provided IP addresses in years.

Most people just want a printer, not two new hobbies.

Why do you want to operate your printer when you're not on your LAN? I certainly have no control over my printer (other than the power switch) from the Outside World. I consider this to be a security feature.

> Why do you want to operate your printer when you're not on your LAN?

Checking the progress of your prints remotely and stopping them if something has gone wrong. There's options for spaghetti detection and so on, but those aren't perfect, and other kinds of failures can happen.

I don't leave the house when I have something printing. You can't extinguish a fire with a remote power switch.

The point of these printers is to be reliable and accessible enough that you don't have to worry about that, just like you don't worry about supervising your drier.

Just like most appliances, a 3D printer will only catch fire in the case of a serious hardware malfunction or egregious user error. The point is for this to be rare enough that the risk is negligible, so all you'd worry about is your print failing.

Considering many of my prints are multi day, this is just silly. I can’t stay home for days. I put my printer in a place where it’s free to burn completely. Any other way is not safe. Safety is about prevention, not attention.

Ngrok does the trick. It's straightfoward. And people that do 3D printers are usually happy to hack a bit here and there.

zrok.io is a nice open source alternative with free SaaS if you are interested. I work on the project.

The point is that you don't want this to just be on LAN, you would want to be able to this from anywhere. That way if you're at work or going out you can still do that. If you wanted it to just be on LAN, you can just disable the cloud features, but for many people that's a big selling point.

You can make it work over the internet without a cloud connection, but it's fiddly and requires set-up (port forwarding or hole punching). People don't want that, and Bambu's value proposition is zero-tweaking at high performance - otherwise you'd go for another model.

It is completely doable, and there's a lot of good software and tutorials to get it done. But there's all sorts of things that could complicate that process.

For instance, with my last 3d printer, I had to open it up and jump some pins on the mainboard, and then had to get a specific piece of (cheap and readily available) USB hardware to write to it from a laptop - and even then, it only worked from a specific USB port on some of my machines, because of weird USB host incompatibilities. And my 3d printer was one of the most common buy-this-one-first products of its time!

Oh, and there was also some weirdness with the PSU as well that somehow caused flakiness when powering up the webcam when I tried to share power for the pi with the printer itself. I'm comfortable with troubleshooting that, but I wouldn't expect nor even want the average person to have to bother with that kind of stuff.

So the appeal/marketing of the Bambu products is that it's not something for tinkerers - it's something that the average person can just setup and immediately get reliable prints, with all the bells and whistles on top of it.

In other words, the idea is that it (quite literally) "just works". Even with the drawbacks that we all know about proprietary devices and cloud services, it does its job for the average person.

The positive side of all this is that Bambu's relative success means a bit of pressure on the other leaders in the 3D printing space, and we can see that they're all iterating quickly and well to compete in aspects where they may have been resting on their laurels before.

> I had to open it up and jump some pins on the mainboard, and then had to get a specific piece of [hardware]

I had to do that for almost every new game and hardware upgrade on my old 386. Welcome to the club, pal.

They’ve been improving lan only move including allowing you to view the video feed. I think you’re being a bit hard on them when they’ve already said they’re making more improvements to lan only and they’re listening to feedback. They released a statement about this issue pretty fast and seemed for transparent than most companies would have been.

What is the justification that the company is entitled to all of my data? This is no different from HP using dark patterns to get the average consumer to lock their printer into the cloud.

A pinkie promise that, "We'll do better after you got burned for our data-collection greed" falls a little flat.

The data in question is how the build plate looks while printing, which gets directly fed back into the ML model used to detect print failures. Spaghetti detection is half the point of owning one.

The camera we’re talking about only sees the inside of the printer.

> The camera we’re talking about only sees the inside of the printer

Devil's advocate, inadvertent peephole cameras and reflections in surprisingly small regions of interest are a fact of how light interacts with glass, metals, low-tolerance parts, and the other sorts of things that make up the printer. There are lots of recent fun papers inverting the pattern going around a curved painted corner or through a hole accommodating the string holding up your blinds or whatnot to get a detailed view of what's on the other side.

Their malicious use cases are probably less cutting edge.

So using it for r&d is out of the question apparently.

You had a lot of options when you purchased that unit yet you still chose Bambu.

> However, part of the initial setup process requires you to connect to the printer via Bluetooth in order to setup the wifi connection in the first place! Clearly it IS possible to communicate with the printer without an internet connection.

This is actually a pretty bad argument. Bluetooth only goes 30 feet, so your connection would likewise only go… 30 feet. All of the things you can control on your smartphone can be controlled on the printer itself, so what’s the point?

Unless you are complaining that you can’t use the smartphone app, while at your own home on Wi-Fi, without connecting to the cloud. That is, I will just say right now, not how 90%+ of customers would expect an app to work. For most people, a smartphone app that only works at home is confusing and upsetting.

Finally, while it doesn’t work from the app, you can control those things and view footage using the Bambu Studio desktop app without a cloud connection, IIRC. You just need a PC, not a phone, though I would argue this makes sense as a fair trade-off considering the consumer demographics. A PC would be way more reliable anyway as your phone would be switching onto cell tower networks which obviously don’t have your printer on them.

Edit: Also, Bluetooth tops out under perfect conditions at 2.2 Megabits. Real world is far lower. You can’t reliably send a video stream over Bluetooth. Heck, Apple doesn’t even try to send a lossless audio stream over Bluetooth.

> This is actually a pretty bad argument. Bluetooth only goes 30 feet, so your connection would likewise only go… 30 feet.

I may not have made myself clear with my original argument, I meant to say offline controls are clearly possible. So if offline controls are possible there’s 0 excuses for controls not to be available in LAN-only mode. (LAN-only is wifi connected, cloud disabled)

> All of the things you can control on your smartphone can be controlled on the printer itself, so what’s the point?

It is way easier to tap a button on the app when dealing with hardware issues than using the built in menus (that’s my opinion). But more importantly there is no valid reason to not make them available in LAN-only mode, that was an intentional decision on their part.

> That is, I will just say right now, not how 90%+ of customers would expect an app to work. For most people, a smartphone app that only works at home is confusing and upsetting.

The 3D printing community is pretty technical, so I think anyone disabling cloud mode would be able to understand the consequences. An opt-out (without degrading the experience) is all bambu owners are asking for. And keep in mind 3D printers are a fire hazard so printing while you aren’t home is a risk.

I told you already, it’s called Bambu Studio. It offers remote control, and monitoring, to a locally networked PC.

https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/software/bambu-studio/remote-co...

You just can’t do it from your phone. Which, considering your phone likes connecting to cell phone towers (and thus disconnecting from your printer), I completely get why they didn’t want to bother.

> considering your phone likes connecting to cell phone towers (and thus disconnecting from your printer)

I don't know what kind of weird broken phones you have, but every smart phone I've ever used has had no trouble connecting to things on local networks via wifi even when not in a cell deadzone. Your objection sounds made up to me.

I see no reason why you couldn't run a printer over BT, indeed there are meany BT printers out there.

You're missing the point; Without Cloud connection, how would the Gongfay Kommissariat know what you're printing so they can deduct Sesame Credit?

You're missing the point. Instead of focusing on 'Bluetooth', focus on GP's underlying point which was that Bamboo should make it possible to have offline experience which is comparable to the cloud connected experience.

Now to address your original concern about Bluetooth. Bluetooth is not the best fit but Bamboo printers do have WiFi. They can host local web UI which is what pretty much every other product does. It requires will and resources to support offline tooling for users though. It also reduces the probability that the user will subscribe to their cloud services, if any.

Coming to the point of an App only working at home. Well, there are several ways to address this issue WITHOUT requiring a user to use their Cloud offering. A simple way is to EDUCATE your users that the app will only function on local wifi. Average users are smarter than you think. If the user would like their app to work when they're not home, offer them an option to connect to the cloud but do not make it mandatory. Next, the printer can use a combination of UPnP, Dynamic DNS to expose it over the internet. Yes, it is scary to do this but with the right security practices it is possible to expose your printer over the internet so your app can reach it. You don't need their cloud to be the intermediary.

Finally, these printers will likely stop working entirely if the company goes out of business or decides to wind down their 3D printing business or just plain planned obsolescence of specific models. All in all, subscription & online paid services for hardware products is an anti-consumer model.

I am convinced you have no idea what you are talking about.

> Finally, these printers will likely stop working entirely if the company goes out of business or decides to wind down their 3D printing business or just plain planned obsolescence of specific models

They can be set up without internet. They can print from a microSD card without internet. I have a Bambu X1, have never connected it to the internet, and everything works fine. No worse than a Prusa from 2 years ago would have.

Except, even better, I can connect it to a LAN, without internet, and access the camera from my PC using their open-source desktop app. I can’t do it from my phone, but my PC isn’t hopping between networks constantly.

Saying it will die if the company goes bankrupt is pure FUD.

I don’t know if it’s worth addressing the other points considering this level of ignorance. Especially this:

> Next, the printer can use a combination of UPnP, Dynamic DNS to expose it over the internet. Yes, it is scary to do this but with the right security practices it is possible to expose your printer over the internet so your app can reach it. You don't need their cloud to be the intermediary.

This has the reasonability of the now-infamous Hacker News diss when Dropbox was invented.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Also, we are in an IP Address shortage. More internet companies like StarLink are disabling port forwarding because they don’t have enough addresses and the cost per address is currently insane. It might not even be an option for a growing number of people out of technical necessity. In addition, many ISPs, including mine (Xfinity), reserve the right to ban you for running a home server of any kind - Bambu obviously doesn’t view encouraging people to persue activities that could get them banned from their ISP as a viable solution. Even with a warning sticker.

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