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Comment by lawn | Hacker News Reader

> They have been struggling as of late, and came under criticism for making the firmware of their Mk4 printer non-free.

One of the biggest reasons I didn't choose a Mk4 was precisely because they moved away from open source.

If you're like me an values open source highly and is looking for a printer, the VORON printers are the way to go. They're DIY printers where you assemble them yourself, so they're not for you if you just want to unbox and press print, but if you want a completely open source printer (from software to hardware) then look no further.

You can even get a cheaper VORON 2.4 or Trident kit for less than the Mk4, and still have some room to replace parts with! And you'll get a much more powerful printer to boot.

Oh, and I avoid the Bambu labs printers because they demand an always on internet connection for you to be able to print with them. The repair-ability is also very poor.

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I have a half assembled Trident on a table behind me right now. Like you, I greatly value open source. I didn't realize at the time I ordered the Trident that the Mk4 firmware was non-free, but Prusa didn't make the final cut regardless. In my mind, Prusa hasn't been showing enough innovation. The bed-slinging Mk4 coming out at the price it did against CoreXY printers like Voron and Bambu was like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Their new extruder is nice but not enough.

I've been really impressed by the Voron community as well. I've found them very helpful and supportive, and the creativity here is amazing. The long list of mods is also impressive: some are incredibly useful and some are more fun than anything else. I understand that a lot of people just want a box to show up at their door that they can plug in and start printing with. Those folks should buy a Bambu. For everyone else, there's Voron.

Pretty much this ^^^. Some people just want to _use_ tools and some people want to build/hack/tinker with them. Voron and Bambu seem to cover both use cases. Annex Engineering has some cool stuff in the 'build' category as well.

MK4 firmware is mostly free AFAIK, except for graphics and design.

I'm a bit further on with my Trident than you are[0], and with around 350 print hours I'm starting to get into the modding swamp. There's just so many good/cool things to add!

I also disqualified the Mk4 on other factors. The Mk4 not having an enclosure and the Tridet having such a small footprint was another major factor for me. (I know there's an enclosure for the Mk4, but it's very large and expensive.)

Building the printer has been super fun too.

[0]: https://www.jonashietala.se/series/voron_trident/

Voron kits are pretty tempting, but although I have been thinking about a Trident one myself, I’ve been looking at the Vivedino Troodon 2.0 series, and wondering why there aren’t more Voron-like pre-assembled printers out there.

> Oh, and I avoid the Bambu labs printers because they demand an always on internet connection for you to be able to print with them.

That hasn't been true for the last year. FWIW.

https://github.com/prusa3d/Prusa-Firmware-Buddy

Not open source? Odd, as I just read it's source code. Are you referring to licensing, ability to modify and compile yourself, or some else?

I'm referring to the hardware, a blog post has been shared several times in this thread.

Ah, you have a quote right above that line stating it is the firmware that is non-free; hardware isn't mentioned. You might want to edit your original post so it is consistent with what you are trying to communicate.

Ah, my bad. Unfortunately I can no longer edit the comment...

No worries, the edit cutoff has bit me before as well. But just to clarify, you do mean that the hardware is closed source, and the firmware is not? I did see some licensing stuff on prusa's GitHub, looks like they have non-commercial licensing for their graphics package.

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