Comment by stavros
3 days ago
That comes with a big caveat. You can either choose to use the printer offline, or online, with no ability to use both. If you want the ability to monitor or pause a print when you're not home on the off chance something goes wrong, you HAVE to send every print through their cloud, there's no middle ground.
That's not Bambu being open, that's them doing the absolute minimum to allow people to say "you can use Bambu printers fully offline" in comment sections.
Monitoring is still possible with Tailscale and Bambu Companion (or a number of third party apps you can put on a Raspberry Pi or similar)
https://testflight.apple.com/join/VXBxZYNr
https://bambuddy.cool/
OK. This doesn't change my view that Bambu is not open, and just does the bare minimum so people can't say it's completely closed.
For most people, it is definitely a closed ecosystem, similar to the iPhone. But they do give people the escape hatch if they're willing to take ownership of the software they run. (To be fair, they only enabled this after a lot of backlash)
3 replies →
Till they block that too. Which given their previous actions is definitely in cards
Works great with home assistant too.
Wait, that’s still just about their phone app. When you disable the cloud features, you lose the phone app, but otherwise the printer is fully usable. You can still connect to it through Bambu studio, you just have to roll your own networking (e.g. a VPN), right?
Yes and no, it seems. Yes in Developer Mode. With that configuration, which confusingly requires you to turn on LAN mode first, you can use your own software to control all features of the device.
In LAN mode it’s more complicated. LAN mode requires you to still use their slicer because the majority of functions beyond the extremely basic are still restricted by their authorization layer. This means using their SDK/network plugin for anything you develop, effectively coercing developers into their ecosystem for use-cases by the majority of users.
It seems pretty clear, in my opinion, that what they’re trying to communicate by using the “developer mode” language is that owning your device end-to-end is big, scary, and only for professionals. Oh, btw, developer mode leaves your device completely open and introduces various UX friction points to the experience related to constantly needing to rebind. Effectively it’s malicious compliance on their end. They’re giving the middle finger to anyone who wants to cut them out, and it’s hard to say anyone who feels that way is imagining it.
You can only connect to it from the same LAN, yes, except you can't connect locally to it unless you disable the cloud features first.
Can you access all that on you local lan though?
If so then you could access it over a reverse proxy like Tailscale.
Its trivially easy to set one up these days.
Trivially easy to set up Tailscale, if you have a machine on 24/7 at home.
If you’ve got the spare time and spare change to set up and coddle a 3d printing hobby you absolutely have the skills and funds to set up Tailscale on a $100 mini pc.
There is a lot of overlap between people who have a NAS and those with a 3D printer.