Comment by mschulkind
14 hours ago
You're missing two things from the whole picture: 1. Cloud mode works without local network access, so their server is involved in the transit of the data to the printer. This is pretty minor, but still within their rights to preserve. 2. For printing from the app, they actually run the computationally expensive slicing algorithm on their servers, so this is totally reasonable to protect.
But in this case the users want to use those features locally and are being blocked. Using a resource constraint argument doesn't make sense for it.
It seems more likely they want it as a revenue source at some point.
Pretty sure you can still print locally either via LAN or just SD card. At least I can on my A1.
The current monetization that they are using is that you can charge for a print on their platform and they take a cut of the sale. If you don’t charge for the design, then it is still free hosting and delivery.
I see where the worry is, but at the moment it seems like people are imagining a worse case scenario.
> But in this case the users want to use those features locally and are being blocked
No, we aren’t being blocked. Turn on LAN mode, pair regular Orca slicer, ignore Bambu for the rest of eternity. Plenty of people have done it.
> No, we aren’t being blocked. Turn on LAN mode, pair regular Orca slicer, ignore Bambu for the rest of eternity. Plenty of people have done it.
You're just saying that Bambu users feel the need to purposely circumvent Bambu's artificial restrictions to be able to continue to use Bambu hardware they bought and paid for.
No matter how you frame this, this ain't right.
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If you turn on LAN mode, it acts exactly like every other printer. You can print directly to it from any slicer over your LAN, or dump gcode on the SD card directly.
People are saying the LAN mode lacks access to the webcam and possibly some other things. That is what this whole controversy is about. It's re-enabling some cloud features as local only and Bambu is calling it privacy or fraud.
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not just lan mode, you have to enable developer mode, which blocks cloud access entirely so you lose advertised functionality.
They probably want to establish a commercial-use license. If you have a big print farm, you likely need all of those remote capabilities so you're going to need to pay for the license. The schmucks at home will likely continue to get it for free. Locking them into the cloud API by dangling convenient features just ensures most people won't stray into the local-only mode.
> 2. For printing from the app, they actually run the computationally expensive slicing algorithm on their servers, so this is totally reasonable to protect.
That's an artificial vendor tie-in, and arguably a feature that only involves their client app and their backend. It's understandable if access to their backend is restricted to a subset of their users if that's the business model they wish. Preventing paying customers from using the hardware they bought and paid for by imposing artificial restrictions is not cool.
Is it artificial though?
They've bought a machine that executes gcode and that it does (at least to my understanding) regardless of where that gcode comes from.
If you want special secret sauce gcode from the bambu cloud, you need to use the bambu cloud.
Those are not the same thing, so IMO it is legit what they do there, because it's such a clear-cut split. You own the physical thing but not the ecosystem around it.
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I would of course personally never buy a bambu lab printer, because they're cloud-tied nonsense that was going to behave exactly like that (the split between hw and ecosystem), but other people knew that too and still bought it, because "what a nice ecosystem".
idk. I just don't think that "right to repair" should mean "right to be saved from the consequences of my own bad actions".
Those bad actions continuing to have no real painful consequences (and with that no real learnings + behavioral correction) after all is why the state of tech has become as bleak as it is right now.
And, honestly, if you can afford a bambu premium machine, there's a 97% chance that you could easily shoulder a total write-off. There's also a 97% chance that your ego can't, but that's the main thing causing all the bad things in the world and should've died a long time ago. Approximately post-highschool.
Nice post. May I ask what you would buy instead (e.g. for the P1S)?
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