Comment by amazingamazing

13 hours ago

I have an Ender3 that I use plugging in a microsd card to do prints with. What am I missing here? Seems like you can do the same with these printers. People want to use the cloud?

Even with an Ender3 many, including myself, would connect it to a raspberryPi with octoprint to be able to send prints over the network. The SD card flow gets very tedious very quickly.

  • Oh god. OctoPrint, I forgot about that tool. Jesus, I'm still subscribed after all of these years. I do not want to know how much money I have been quietly bleeding for this tool.

I think people like having an option for remote over the network communication. The cloud is not technically required for that. Bambu made it required for no good reason.

  • Doesn’t it have a lan mode?

    • Yes, and aside from being able to send and monitor your prints from their mobile app (and there are third party implementation of a similar app), you really don't lose much by using LAN Mode, especially if you pair it with Tailscale.

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I can imagine not having to do the “save to sd card, eject, put in printer, fiddle with the printers crappy ui to select the print” flow might be attractive to some. Find the model you want in the web, click “send to printer”, done.

I don’t mind the sd card thing, also happy with my bottom of the barrel ender 3.

I have an Ender 3 too. And I have a Bambu machine - that I leave offline and use via microSD card as the Ender got me used to.

I get it. The convenience of networking - when it works FOR the customer - is great.

But networking controlled by corporations is a path to enshittification.

  • At least your use case would be served well by enabling LAN mode, which doesn't let the printer talk to the internet, even if you want it to (and I want mine to).

    • The problem is trust. I don't want to get into an adversarial relationship with my printer over networking.

      I could enable LAN mode and trust the mode does what it says.

      I could trust others firmware reverse engineering to verify LAN mode does what it says.

      I could isolate it on it's own wifi and I could block it at the home firewall from accessing the internet, to be sure.

      But it was easier to simply leave it off my network.

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