Comment by robflynn
1 day ago
My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician.
This is part of the wider problem and heavily relates to the right to repair
Cory talked about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs
> how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician
At least 25 years. That's the time passed since the first introduction of Eurion marks on banknotes. As far as I know, noone has used it to block reproduction of anything other than money.
When I was in college I wrote a computer program (yes, involving yellow text) that couldn't be photocopied because I put the "o"s in the right place to trigger the eurion-finding algorithm. People thought it was neat.
That isn't true though, coupons, boarding passes, and even confidential documents use Eurion marks. It's not everywhere because it isn't worthwhile going through the hassle of getting printers that can print them; while 3D printing OEM parts would be much more valuable.
Who issues Eurion-marked boarding passes?
That strikes me as extremely counterproductive given the actually sensitive part of a BP is an (outside of the US) unsigned, semi-publicly-documented barcode.
When flying with easyJet, we can just print boarding passes using any old printer. As long as the number matches up, no security is required.
Lots non-currency of documents around the world with EURion marks. If you're a secure printing shop and your business model primarily revolves around impressing your clients with long lists of document security features, it'd be malpractice to not implement this kind of padding.
EURion marks are a feature you must include on your banknote for it to even be considered real. And it's _one_ feature. It's relatively trivial to make a chip which can detect their presence.
On the other hand, if I need a replacement part for something, it's unlikely I will find the manufacturer giving me models for it. And if a manufacturer is giving me models for it, they probably do so with the explicit expectation that I might end up using them to manufacture a replacement.
In most cases either me or some other volunteer will need to measure the existing part, write down all the critical measurements, and then design a new part from scratch in CAD.
Even if somehow you are able to fingerprint on those critical measurements, that's just _one_ part.
The only way this kind of nonsense law could work is if you mandate that 3D printers must not accept commands from an untrusted source (signature verification) and then you must have software which uses a database to check for such critical measurements, ideally _before_ slicing.
Except that still doesn't work because I can always post-process a part to fit.
And it doesn't work even more because the software will need to contain a signing key. Unless the signing key is on a remote server somewhere to which you must send your model for validation.
This is never going to work, or scale.
There are even more hurdles... I can design and build a 3D printer from scratch and manufacture it using non-CNC machined parts at home. A working, high quality 3D printer.
Where are you going to force me to put the locks? Are you going to require me to show my ID when buying stepper motors and stepper motor drivers?
What about other kinds of manufacturing (that these laws, at least the Washington State ones, also cover)?
Will you ban old hardware?
What about a milling machine? Are you going to ban non-CNC mills?
These are the most ignorant laws made by the most ignorant people. The easiest way to ban people from manufacturing their own guns is to ban manufacture of your own guns. But again, this is a complete non-issue in the US where you can probably get a gun illegally more easily than you can 3D print something half as reliable.
> This is never going to work, or scale
Neither does DRM, really, but it certainly causes a great deal of inconvenience, and is upheld by the legal system.
As an European I'd say any USAnite can almost get a gun with breakfast cereal boxes. But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.
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Actually I tried to use it just for fun on some vouchers, but it didn't work on the copy machines I tried. They just happily photocopied the vouchers.
Tried the same, doesn't do anything on my scanner. Interestingly, there are regions of banknotes my scanner refuses to scan. But had no time to investigate further.
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Is this true? Couldn't I put the mark on a page of my book and photocopiers would still detect and refuse to copy that page?
Yes, absolutely. It's a pattern of five rings, well-documented although Omron appears to keep the exact details pretty tightly held.
They don't have to be exact circles, they just have to be some dots in about the right place. In the UK, the Bank of England issued notes with Elgar on them and the EURion constellation picked out in musical notes ;-)
No idea why this comment is getting downvoted so hard. This was exactly what I thought of too, and it provides a concrete answer to the question.
There’s valid concern with these types of laws and scope creep. But there’s also precedent which shows they can work and be applied reasonably.
Suuure buddy, we just need to throw away every gun and introduce new ones with special marks telling software not copy.
Go ahead, try that
Too bad everyone jumped shipped to Bambuu Labs. If only we still had open source hardware.
We do still have open source hardware but that's the last line of defense against actions like this, not the first. They'll target distribution which will affect open source and proprietary hardware equally. You need to kill this sort of legislation in its crib.
You need both, because there really is no such thing as kill it in it's crib. The people that want this will continue to want it forever, and will continue to propose it forever. And eventually it works.
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Just print the code to do what ever is disallowed on a t-shirt, ala DVDCSS. Is that not a legitimate way around things like this?
Prusa is still kicking... if open source hardware is your priority.
Prusa had been moving towards proprietary licensing (if they release files at all) for a while now, due to their open source design files being used to undercut the original with cheaper clones.
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My Bambu printer is working great in LAN mode on a vlan with no internet access. Never even complains about it. I'm not concerned.
You can still make an open source printer with some extrusion and stepper motors, same as always.
This bill would effectively make prusa illegal, which is my main issue with it. I refuse to buy anything else if it is not open in the same way.
We still have open source hardware in Voron. High performance and almost infinitely moddable. Pair it with the open source Klipper firmware and open source slicer OrcaSlicer and you're there.
3D printer hardware is pretty simple. All the magic happens in software, and there's plenty of open-source options.
All the open source designs from 10 years ago still work, not like they went away.
Sovol open source hardware and software.
AnyCubic AMS is great
I had the Kobra S1 with the ACE Pro and I couldn't get rid of the thing fast enough, probably the worst electronic device I have ever owned in my entire life. In 8 months with it I completed one multi-colour print, and that was only with ~30 filament changes - to be fair to Anycubic, their support has been excellent and they kept shipping me more and more parts to replace, none of which would solve the fundamental issue of the ACE being generally unfit for the job. In the end if was just a fancy £300 filament dryer, and I decided that you know what, even my Ender 5 was giving me fewer issues than this whole thing. I got an H2D with 2 AMSes and yes, they cost a fortune but they just work. I finished a 9 colour print with 800 filament changes the other day and it just worked fine, not a single problem.
I will always admit that maybe I was just unlucky with my S1 but both the printer and the ACE was horrendous experiences and I wouldn't recommend them to anyone based on my problems with them.
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None I know did. If you do your research, all the hype around Bambu is paid. Influencers pushed it. Tech deep dives show it is sub standard. Posted on HN.
Prusa is king. High quality. Open source. EU made and engineered. Slicer is a market leader (Bambu's a fork of it).
Prusa may still be king if you're using printers commercially, running them hard 24/7 in a print farm, wanting to be sure your investment has a decent lifespan with readily-available spare parts and upgrade options.
But it's a premium brand now. For lighter use by hobbyists, Bambu is the clear winner on price/performance. The 'less open' downside is not a factor to most people, and the printers generally work so well out-of-the-box that repairability isn't as much of a concern as it was on printers of the past.
Personally I went from a Prusa MK3s to a Bambu P1P (after looking long+hard at Prusa options), and so far, no regrets. (Although I've kept the old Prusa as a 2nd printer and upgraded it to a MK3.5, but mostly just because I do enjoy a bit of tinkering with them)
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I'm a hobbyist and price, in the end, sold me on Bambu Labs.
(And I stayed once I saw the quality. Likely Prusa can match or exceed it, but not with what I was willing to lose from my wallet.)
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Prusa used to be king.
Their QC and customer support has gradually been getting worse. Their printers are rarely competitive feature-wise. Several printer lines are quietly being retired - with bugs remaining open for years and new features only occasionally being backported from other printers. The open-source part is mostly abandoned due to cheaper third-party clones abusing it.
Don't get me wrong, I really like my Prusa printer, but in 2025 I'd have a really hard time justifying buying another one. The "Prusa premium" just doesn't seem to be worth it anymore.
This _cannot_ be true
I'm new to 3D printing, so grains of salt abound, but since I started in on the hobby this Christmas, I've purchased four 3D printers. 3 budget-but-highly-regarded kings to start, but they all gave me tons of trouble. The Elegoo Centauri Carbon I got for Christmas that sparked this mess is a budget knockoff of the Bambu X1C, but in the first 30 days of ownership, I experienced 2 hardware failures that (thanks to having to ship parts from Mainland China) have resulted in 16 days of downtime.
To deal with the downtime, I bought a stopgap Qidi Q2, but it had tons of problems -- problems which, according to the reviewers, have all been solved for. Ambiguous error messages. Poor English. Choices between "OK" and "Confirm", neither of which advanced the system. Mainboard errors. Extruder failures. Boot failures. Firmware upgrade failures. I experienced all of these within the first 3 hours of ownership, and filed for a return.
I was working on a project that needed a printer, and now despite having bought a bunch of printers, I didn't have any printers that could print. Looking around locally at what I could buy that day amounted to either a Bambu P2S or a Sovol SV08. I struggled here, because I would _much_ rather be the Sovol owner than the Bambu owner, but I needed a printer, not a project, and so I decided I'd try out the Bambu until I got done with what I needed it for, and then I'd return it.
But it turns out it was amazing. The others (admittedly, budget units) were loud and cantankerous, but the Bambu was only uncivilized for a few minutes of each print, and the rest of the time you barely noticed it running. The ecosystem is obviously great. Being able to monitor jobs or initiate prints from my phone is admittedly a novelty, but it's a nice one, and one that speaks to a consistency of integration. But the important part is that it just worked. There were printable upgrades available, I didn't need to print modular pieces to fix design flaws like the other units. I didn't need to move it further away to deal with the noise. I didn't need to investigate arcane error messages because none ever arose.
Now, I haven't owned a Prusa, so I'm not trying to compare them. I understand that Prusa hardware quality is amazing. I believe that. I'm also wildly interested in the community efforts to implement tool-changing with INDX and INBXX, and they're the kinds of projects that I want to tinker with. But if I'm to own a Prusa, or a Sovol, or a Voron, it'll have to be as my second printer (well technically third, because I still own the Elegoo because it's too cheap to bother trying to return) because most of the time I want to print things, not tinkering with the printer. But while the Prusa machines might be amazing, the Prusa XL is wildly expensive for 5 colors, and the Core One right now can't be bought with multi-color capabilities.
I'm not trying to argue against Prusa here, but the idea that only shills are into Bambu seems flatly wrong. I am ideologically opposed to how Bambu got to the market position they've reached, and for sure they've undoubtedly got a fair amount of shills in their employ but sadly, their products more than live up to the hype.
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I wonder if you could circumvent this by adding a thin appendage to whatever it was you're printing and then just snip it off post-print.
IP/BigCo lawyers are probably the main lobbyists behind this article in the bill so I would think soonish
I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.
I was assured by the internet, I was paranoid, blah blah safety...
Then a few weeks ago something about Minnesota and ICE making drones illegal to fly or something...
The weird part is that, in that 15 years, I've become more moderate and pro-democratic rule of law... but I was right about my previous concerns. Not that I believe in the Justice behind them anymore.
Recently they banned all new DJI drones and as far as I know they were basically the only option in the consumer space? And there's nothing domestically of course :/
They sort of tried with the remote ID and FRIA shit, I really doubt anyone but the kind of person that buys DJI or maybe the most broken hall monitor types bother with remote ID on fixed wing even above 250g. I think the Trump admin banned (or tried) to ban all the important parts for all RC craft, so maybe they'll keep jousting with windmills even harder.
>I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.
My Plato hating friend, my "called it" list is filled with things the old-timers at the time said no one would be stupid enough to, and the old codgers went and died on me so I can't even give em a good lambast. I believed them, and helped them build things... Now I get to watch things get coopted by a madman and a NatSec apparatus. Pour one out.
The rights abuses occurring in Minnesota and at the hands of ICE are better characterised as a degradation of democracy, not a failure of it.
EDIT: To be clear, my belief is that a plurality of the voting population voted for this, that much is obvious.
My belief is also that despite the fact that the current administration was elected, there are democratic norms and rules for what outcomes require that a bill must be passed to enact, that states can decide how they can govern themselves within well defined bounds.
All of this is being ignored despite the structures defined in the American democatric system, not because of it.
Yep. Democracy is working according to a non-minority in the country. Agree to disagree?
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I guess it was a predictable outreach from the Patriot act - the new justification is flying drones "over a mission" from the border people, and they claim a lot of territory for their missions, right?
More likely the videos of FPV drones from Ukraine showing that an inexpensive quadcopter can be a very effective weapon of war.
And that radio jamming no longer neutralizes that threat.
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they also don't publish the NOTAMs ahead of time. So, they're effectively allowing ICE to retroactively make flying a drone illegal if an agent takes issue with the color of your cheesburger bun.
It's my understanding that they are no longer the border people as Trump extended their reach to every square inch of the USA
To be fair, ICE is not particularly caring about rule of law. And DOJ is currently not caring about rule of law or constitution either. They are kind of irrelevant.
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probably about 6 months after people start screaming about the issue
I’ll just build my own 3D printer lol. Did it college 15 years ago. I’ll do it again.
The obvious next move is to ban all sales of 3D printer parts. You got a license for that extruded aluminum profile?
"And when you're done that, can you build another one and sell it to me?"
You see how it's impossible to regulate technology? I don't want my tax dollars funding impossible missions.
> And when you're done that, can you build another one and sell it to me?
Yep, that's exactly what the fed undercover will say.
And sure, they can't catch everyone, but they don't have to. They just need to catch and visibly prosecute enough people to create a chilling effect. It's about making it harder, not making it impossible.
Whether the cost/benefit here justifies those gains is a different question.
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I would unironically love to see the diy 3d printer scene come back.
It never went away. The Voron continues to be a popular DIY 3D printer, tho many people choose to buy ready-made printers.
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Open Source and DIY 3d printer scene is very active.
I’ve unclogged enough nozzles in my lifetime thanks
You can do that if it is still legal.