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For everyone in the EU who bought their product within the last two years directly from Bambu Land or from a German reseller:
Stay calm. There is a very highly probability that German customer protection laws will cover your asses - Bambu Lab EU is based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and German customer protection laws goes beyond EU rules and applies to you.
I am currently working with three other enthusiasts, one being a lawyer -working in a different field, though- to clarify our options and will also talk to a customer protection agency.
Short explanation:
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German customer protection laws enable the customer of any online shop to “check” the sold product for 14d in a way they would check the product at a real world shop. The feature set and sales claims provided at this time do provide the base for finalization of the sale.
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The seller (!= Manufacturer!) has to provide a warranty for two years - for 6 months the burden of prove that the fault was not present at the delivery falls towards the seller, for the remaining time to the buyer. As BL does communicate the chanhe openly this is not an issue.
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BL furthermore claims that some uses fall outside the “intended use”. This is completely irrelevant - that is only relevant if they claim that they cannot provide warranty due to use outside the intended use. They still cannot reduce the feature set.
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Which holds more merit is the claim of BL that they are reducing a side feature/unintended feature. This explanation has, in the past, been used a few times in court successfully,but lately it has not been accepted anymore - even App connections for cars have been deemed a “base feature” that might play a significant role in choosing a car. It especially has not merit in cases when this defence is used to force a user to give up their (sensitive) data.
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BL also has a five year update policy in their TOS (which is mostly invalid otherwise,though) - and blocking users from updating if they don’t want to loose features and give up data is also very likely a breach of contract.
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There are also GDPR and market law implications that need to be considered.
What does that all mean? What can happen in the end?
It is highly unlikely that this proceedings can change the course of BL - these companies don’t give a fuck. But it might force them to basically reverse the sale (you would need to pay them for the actual use, though - but that is miniscule). Of course BL can also close their office in the EU and try to only sell from outside the EU - but that will put a very large crosshair on their back in terms of customs and taxes.
I keep you updated.
Update 21/01/25 Spoke with a customer protection associations lawyer for a short time, the longer answer will follow later. Few key facts:
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The fact that you once could use external tools and control while using cloud connection as well and soon cannot do this anymore is a relevant feature change, that it might affect the base of the sale. Developer mode is not a full replacement for that.
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There are some other issues with Bambu Lab policies, especially their return policies, that will be looked into as they directly contradict German law.
thank you for looking into this and sharing your findings!
Update in the main post above
awesome, thank you!
The updated blog post does change the legal position they have maneuvered themselves in within the EU.
Also,they are basically lying in their post:
We want to make it absolutely clear that all of these claims are entirely false: Bambu Lab will remotely disable your printer (“brick” it). Firmware updates will block your printer’s ability to print.
While:
Due to the importance of these updates, your product may block new print job before the updates is installed, and will immediately provide update notifications to help you understand the related information.
(TOS 7.4)
Additionally the required certificates of course have a expiry date and after that you won’t be able to connect outside of developer mode.
Legally, they are also in hot water with their “no support” developer mode at least within the EU. First of all they can’t remove support for functions that were present at the time of the sale. Additionally denying support within the warranty period for use that is within the normal use even if developer modes,etc. are used is considered illegal - they can ask Samsung, Google and Sony about their experience in court for those cases, they all failed.
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Well this is… disappointing. I picked up an A1 at the end of last year because it “just works”, and I was tired of fighting my Ender 3 instead of actually printing with it. I’m extraordinarily happy with the quality of the printer itself, but I’ll be refraining from updating the firmware I guess, as I don’t allow it to use cloud services, and it lives on my LAN as the only means of management.
I’m infuriated by this change, but I’m also frustrated because they really are very good printers. There’s a reason so many people bought them and they became so popular, they are very very good.
But this change is utter bullshit, I won’t be upgrading my firmware any time soon.
As Rossman points out, they said they’ll stop you from printing if you don’t upgrade your firmware.
It’s insane.
They can fucking try.
I’m curious: what will you do then?
It’s already possible to make the printer work entirely offline but even if by some stroke they were able to disable them anyway, I’d sell it in a heartbeat.
No, they didn’t. They explicitly said that you’re free to not upgrade for now in the announcement.
They have a section in their TOS that says they can block you from using the printer if you don’t upgrade, which sucks, but that is a generic clause, doesn’t mean they’ll make use of that here, and from their communication I don’t suspect they will, at least for the time being.
I’m very glad I didn’t buy one of their printers. The RFID tag thing was enough to keep me from buying anything from them. This is even worse.
The RFID tag thing was enough to keep me from buying anything from them
Why?
I was worried that Bambu would try to pull the same crap that Dymo did with their label printers.
Their implementation of RFID is closed source iirc.
Its the start of exactly the kind of thing that inkjet printers are doing with DRM in their cartridges.
RFID-identifying rolls of filament is a good thing. I would like that very much. I can’t count the number of times I loaded the wrong roll and printed with the wrong material on our Prusa Mk4. Not to mention, I would like that the printed warned me if the roll I’ve loaded doesn’t contain enough filament to complete the print I’m about to start.
What I really would have a beef against is the printer refusing to print with anything that isn’t RFID-tagged from Bambu.
But to my knowledge, Bambu printers don’t do that. They don’t prevent you from using generic rolls do they?
Not yet anyway, but considering what a shit company Bambu Lab is, they certain could and probably will at some point. Still, for the time being, they don’t.
Is your concern the fact that they could suddenly lock Bambu printers to Bambu-approved filaments?
What if Prusa implemented RFID roll identification? Would you feel the same way?
What if Prusa implemented RFID roll identification?
Yes of course. Any machine that has DRM on it and has the ability to kill itself when its company demands, is a piece of worthless junk.
RFID isn’t DRM. But let’s overlook that.
So the trustworthiness of the company implementing RFID doesn’t matter at all to you?
But this particular RFID has some sort of encryption-something, that means that other companies can’t make them.
I don’t like it, but since I can still use other brands without the convenience of RFID tags, it’s not a deal-breaker.
I loaded third-party filament onto my spools with RFID several times and it worked fine.
I have since started printing almost exclusively from a filament dryer (AMS lite works fine this way), so it doesn’t matter anymore.
But this particular RFID has some sort of encryption-something
Ah right I didn’t know. I thought they used plain-jane ASCII tags with some known documented format.
That sucks.
There are no trustworthy companies… The whole point of a company is to act in its own best interest. If they can sell you something that they can later utilize to extract money from you, then they will do it.
The Problem with the RFID wasnt that is was tagged, but that the Codes of the RFID Chips werent publicly availible to write onto any spool Filament that has RFID in it.
I use Spoolman with labels to manage that, plugs into klipper so tracks usage, can swap filament on the screen. It supports qr code labels too, wanting to do something with scan in/scan out in the future but just having my filament tracked is helpful.
I haven’t look at their hardware so I don’t know if you can flash custom firmware but at the very least you could buy a new board and kick them to the curb.
The current firmware has a lan only mode that the new firmware will now require a cloud based login to work. So if you already own one the best option is to turn lan only mode on and block it from the Internet from your router firewall, and uninstall bambu handy™️ and bambu studio™️ and use orca slicer instead.
I assume it will still be able to print from the SD card with the new firmware but not sure, haven’t looked into that yet.
I was talking about replacing their firmware or their control board with a marlin board if it wasn’t compatible.
There’s a custom firmware already, I haven’t tried it yet: https://github.com/X1Plus/X1Plus/wiki
Saw this from the moment they did the rfid nonsense, doubled down on my beliefs when they started burning cash on advertising like crazy. Tons of youtubers and such shill this shit
They had a series b round in 2023 of an undisclosed amount with several chinese vc companies and they’ve had investments in 2021 and 2022 as well. I don’t know how chinese vc works but I assume it’s similar to american vc where there is a strong demand from the backer(s) to monetize in this fashion
Why do you think reddit went to shit? Series b in 2014. Those people drop serious cash. Reddits seed round in 2005 at y combinator was for 100k. That’s serious money to you and me, but to vc people that’s not worth getting out of bed. Reddits 2014 series b was fifty million. They suddenly had a gigantic influx of cash to grow infrastructure and compete with the big dogs like meta and twitter. They were fairly successful with this. They then raised 1.2 billion over 4 rounds from 2017-2021. That’s why they had a relatively quick turn to shit; that money was to try to make the site bland and profitable in preparation for ipo. It worked out because the stock made investors a ton of cash at the expense of making the site dogshit
Bambu will have a similar trajectory. Investors will give them an amount of money that is frankly obscene, they will use that money to develop (and probably to party, ridiculous salaries and/or fluff jobs, and have really fancy offices), then they will actively make the product worse. 5 years from now they will have used that money to entrench themselves in the market space. Don’t be surprised if the average person thinks “bambu” when they think “3d printer” because they pissed away 10s of millions on advertising. But their printers will have more consumer hostile bullshit (finally fully locking out 3rd part filament instead of just requiring you to do a pain in the ass respooling seems inevitable) like this and it would not be surprising to see the build quality suffer too.
They’re run by a bunch of former DJI execs, the spy drone company.
100% spy drone.
But the best that there is (so far).
Yeah that’s what kept me off Bambu printers right off the bat when I started looking at brands I’d want to get months ago.
Leopards ate your face. May open source thrive
I wonder how easy would it be to swap the controller for something more open like the BTT boards? That way you’d get the nice design and an open platform. I’m not sure how much of their wiring could be repurposed for this though.
The controller, at least in the A1 and A1 mini, is an ESP chip. Probably an ESP32S3. You don’t need to swap any hardware, just open it up and find its UART pins to flash it.
(I know they’re ESPs because the device name shows up as espressif on my router)
That doesn’t mean it’s the board actually controlling the printer though. It could just be used as an interface component because they’re easy to use as the middle-man on network connected devices.
I am fairly sure it’s what is controlling the printer.
Looking at the board, I think you’re right but it’s definitely a custom board so exposing the UART might be fairly difficult.
Although it looks like it wouldn’t do much good (no klipper support for esp32)
You’d be surprised how often the UART is already exposed for factory programming.
As well, what I gathered from that thread is that they aren’t supported, because it’s a bit of overhead, and because they aren’t supported no one makes ESP32 printer boards. I think if suddenly a whole bunch of folks with A1s wanted to replace the firmware that might be a good userbase to add support for?
Maybe, maybe not it’s hard to say. I think most BL printer owners don’t really care or don’t want to mess with soldering tiny wires to tiny pads on their board and mess with flashing the device. The people buying these are generally not the tech-fiddling type.
I’m the tech-fiddling type and I bought one, my housemate is the tech-fiddling type and she bought one, our friend is the tech-fiddling type and she bought one. We all bought them because we wanted to spend our tech-fiddling time on the projects themselves and not on the printer.
Y’all, I fell for it.
I bought a Bambu X1C and fully regret it. Just sent them a return request and called their product Defective by design in my RMA. I don’t expect them to acknowledge it but I figured I would send them a hefty fu first. I’m spending the rest of my afternoon downgrading firmware on this thing until I can install X1plus on it. Where am I buying my next 3D printer? Prusa? Do they have a bigger one that can print ppa-cf?
- “They played us like a damn fiddle!” Kazuhira Miller
Just did this yesterday. You won’t need the whole afternoon. It was surprisingly simple.
Are you within the EU? If yes, there is a good chance you can force them to return it - they fall under German law as Bambu Lab EU is based in Germany and German consumer protection laws are very strict in that terms.
Could also go down the voron route as they’re big but don’t know if someone’s made cf capability but I’d bet so
In another thread on this enshittification, someone pointed out a similiar enclosed CoreXY brand, Qidi, that just runs FOSS Klipper. Looked very comparable, with the upcoming generation looking to have an AMS-like multifilament feeder.
Seems like most of the models include a chamber heater for better prints, especially on ABS which I’d given up on without a heater. Comes with brass nozzle for regular filaments, and a steel nozzle for CF filaments. This has replaced the Bambu on my wishlist.
https://qidi3d.com/products/qidi-x-max-3
Owner testimonial: https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/comment/14514530
That was me!
I think. Your link doesn’t appear to go to the comment in question, or else I am blind. (Either is possible.) I just finished a large drawer shell print with my X-Max 3 mere minutes ago, in fact.
Fixed, I was 1 level too high to show your comment easily.
My wife has an older QIDI X-one 2 printer and it’s been really great. We load the g-code to the SD card and it just prints. The one she has we rarely have to even level the bed. I have another printer with a larger print bed but have to level it every print and it’s a pain.
Have an x-plus 1 and a q1 pro, both great printers that serve me well. Built a cnc machine on the x-plus lol. Abs works even with the non heated chamber, but the q1 pro has the heater for more reliability and more engineering plastics to print with. Also cheap as hell compared to bamboos. Ama if you guys want
MPCNC?
Nah that one sucks ass. Root 4 and later a PrintNC which I use currently to mill out molds n’such
I built an MPCNC for building kitchen cabinets, then managed to wreck it moving it, it was pretty fragile. I’ve been considering building a Lowrider since all I really would use it for is more cabinets and that seems pretty portable/storable with a full sheet print bed.
Lowrider sucks too. Cncs are all about rigidity. You need a serious gantry to do stuff accurately. Root is the cheap way because it uses rollerskate bearings. Printnc is the expensive option, which uses linear rails.
I have a Qidi Q1 Pro and I’m pretty happy with it. Very fast precise prints and pretty reliable. There’s definitely some strange design decisions and weird quirks to it and Bambu machines feel way more polished. Overall I’d definitely recommend the Qidi machines but they are not quite as simple for people with no 3d printing experience. They are very feature rich and amazing printers for the price.
What would you say are the quirks? I come from building my own printers for the last 15 years, so I’d say I’m fairly experienced.
What are the interesting features?
Q1 pro has a filament wiper and a poop trashcan that you need to empty. You’ll do fine using them, they’re a great tool to use as a beginner, just get “quirks” that someone that googles can solve. For the x-plus for instance, the nozzle fan only blows from one direction so you need to print out a two directional one for better printing stability. Honestly, it was my first printer and I did great with it.
Weirdness: The default g-code for the machine does silly things like park the nozzle over the build plate letting it ooze, instead of over the nozzle wiper/waste container.
The filament change routine is strange, requiring you to remove the bowden tube to cut the filament every time. This is easily fixed by printing a filament cutter and using that to cut the filament.
The bowden tube rubs against the top plexiglass lid for the machine, requiring you to print a riser for the lid to avoid it getting all scratched up.
The door for the machine is an odd shape design with no handle making it a little annoying to get a grip to open it.
The filament holder they include is a very bad design, flexes heavily with a full roll of filament and I have had spools fall off several times while printing.
The touch screen menu isn’t very intuitive and it can be very laggy at times.
Good features for the price point: Fully enclosed with built in chamber heater.
Pretty decent auto leveling system.
Timelapse camera.
Runs klipper/mainsail and input shaping is pretty cool.
I have around 500 hours on mine and I haven’t had any prints fail that were the fault of the machine so I’m pretty impressed by that. And I find the features and capabilities to be pretty great for the price point. They just could use to do some polishing of the design
I bought one based on this thread, but only set it up a few days ago.
Two days ago, my five-year-old requested that I print them a cat. I downloaded two cat models, one that was print-in-place bendy and one that was meant to test your calibration. I tried to print both, but both of them caused the printer to hang after displaying "stop processing, please wait … "
I spent several hours testing and troubleshooting this, only to find an old thread saying that the printer firmware can’t handle filenames between 6-9 characters (not including the extension), meaning the filenames could be 5 characters or fewer; or 10 or more. I had named my files
calicat.gcodeandflexicat.gcode. After adjusting them to be longer filenames, everything started working beautifully.I’m very happy with the printer now that I know that, but it seems such a random error that it was very frustrating to try to fix. I thought my printer arrived broken. Hopefully if someone else encounters the same problem, they find this post and it fixes their problems!
I have never actually tried printing off the device itself, the touch screen is very confusing. I always submit print jobs over the network via OrcaSlicer. But yes, that is exactly the kind of thing I meant when I said it has some odd quirks.
I think my first print was with the touch screen.
I printed a few things by sending directly from the Qidi slicer that came with it, but it pretty consistently is crashing at 40-80% when connecting through the network. I’ve been using the web interface directly and that’s going pretty well.
Offtopic, how are you doing abs? An enclosure is a must, with one you should be able to do successful prints so long as you have a heated bed. Give it a good long heat soak at a high bed temp (I do 105-110c on the prusa) for an hour before you even start will go a long way. If you have enclosure or bed fans, even better, you’d be surprised just how hot you can get an enclosure with just the bed, this on my v2.4 so it’s a higher than the prusa
Make sure your surface is oil free, dish soap and water if your surface allows it, some of the smooth pe surfaces I’ve had better luck roughing them up a bit with a scotchbrite pad or brass brush. I use a Buildtak surface these days but had success with standard sheets and a brim.
I eventually built a coreXY printer with a chamber (had to build my own since the patent wasn’t off for heated chambers yet, but then I’d built half a dozen printers already so no big deal) and I got pretty good prints with that, but I’d have to replace the hotend fan fairly often as it would get cooked and usually every time that would happen I’d have to do a coldpull.
I would use bluetape and gluestick to keep it down. When PETG came out, I just mothballed all that because it gave me everything I needed in ABS except maybe the rigidity, but I’d just design to compensate.
If you were buying Bambu you already didn’t care about this
I care. I bought Bambu anyway, because there’s a LAN only option. I enabled it today. I am also not going to upgrade firmware.
For how long? 3d printer firmware upgrades often bring some meaningful enhancements. Imagine that might be hard to resist forever
Forever is a long time. I’m sad I won’t get upgrades, but I didn’t expect any when I bought it. I’ll be fine for a while.
When I feel that big an itch for a new thing, I’ll buy a new thing. Probably something Prusa branded.
I’ve been considering a Bambu until today. From what I learned today, there is no Lan only option. It now must connect to their servers to let you print. They also said they will disable your ability to print if you don’t upgrade the firmware.
I wouldn’t buy a new Bambu now. But the one I have has a LAN only option, and i assume it will keep it as long as I don’t upgrade my firmware.
I don’t see how they would disable my printer without updating firmware. Maybe I should block all internet communication just to be sure.
You should definitely block it from having internet access. I don’t see any way how they’d prevent us from printing when not on the latest firmware if it can’t phone home.
There is a true lan only if you switch to the x1plus custom firmware and they’ll never be able to take that away.
there’s a LAN only option. I enabled it today.
Do you trust it to not “phone home” anyway?
That’s a separate issue from requiring internet access / cloud / their servers to be online to print.
It’s not that difficult to go into your router and just block all external traffic from a device so yes I trust mine not to phone home.
I assume it does. If I had a big problem with that, I wouldn’t have connected it to the internet in the first place.
However, the talk about disabling printers without this update makes me think I should probably block it.
You would think that everybody owning a 3D printer would at least be somewhat of a tinkerer and therefore oppose this. Looking around however I’ve already seen a frustrating amount of people ridiculing the people calling this out. You’re probably right though and the people who don’t care will probably mostly have gathered around Bambu.
The whole point of bambu was that it was a 3d printer for people who didn’t want to tinker.
The people on this sub assume everyone who buys products do a ton of research on the companies making those products instead of just watching a couple reviews.
Most people are not as informed as those that appear in a dedicated 3d printing sub.
I’m still on an ender 3
Well, I don’t own my own printer yet, and I plan on buying Prusa because they’re (still mostly) open-source and respect the user, even though every Tom, Dick and Harry tells me to get a Bambu printer because they’re three times cheaper and better.
This is why I won’t get a Bambu printer.
They’re not open source anymore. You can’t be mostly open source, you either are or are not.
IMO they started exactly the same path Bambu goes (though Bambu has a great head start).
I admit this is speculation, but I got the impression that Prusa is moving away from open source because they’re salty about other companies cloning their products and selling them much cheaper than the “original” parts. Proprietary parts, patents, etc. is of course worse for the user than a fully open ecosystem, but he isn’t necessarily going full anti-consumer.
Seems pretty spot on and it has been this way for years. Even in 2020 when I bought my first printer, Prusa was charging $1,000 for a printer that everyone else was selling for $300-$400. They only maintained through that due to good will from the community and the rest of the market outside of Creality being little cottage-type businesses that weren’t selling high volume.
Even now in addition to the closed-source boards, they have a closed-source cloud-based smartphone app
Here’s a 2 year old post on reddit bringing up the same concerns:
https://www.reddit.com/r/prusa3d/comments/10g6fgv/prusa_giving_up_on_its_open_source_roots/
It’s certainly possible. They are pretty explicit on it though, at least.
"For some products, we do not release the full PCB manufacturing layouts, as we do not want to support manufacturing of untested clone boards. "
https://www.prusa3d.com/page/open-source-at-prusa-research_236812/
Found the blog post that I was thinking of, with a little more about Prusa’s relation with opene source. https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-printing-in-2023_76659/
I mean, you either can afford Prusa or you can’t. A Chinese fake Prusa knockoff is in no way interesting to people who want and expect the Prusa quality (though I haven’t had much luck with the fabled quality myself, the printer needed fixing multiple times). And people who can’t afford a Prusa are not a potential customer anyway. So cheap knockoffs are not stealing any customers.
Bambu is who’s stealing Prusa’s customers en masse and Prusa decided that they’re gonna slowly lock down their ecosystem while benefiting from years of open source by other people and projects. Which is, ironically enough, their stated reason for locking their ecosystem - people benefiting from their open source work while being closed.
The most common reasons to buy Prusa that I have heard are their 24/7 support, warranty and wanting to support a European company. I’m not entirely up to date with Chinese manufacturers, so things could have changed, but at least in the past Fysetc, Blurolls and even Trianglelab seemed to be on par, or even exceeding, Prusa quality for printers and parts.
This may sound like a dumb idea. But cant we just fork there firmware and flash our own? It runs klipper under the hood which means its a gpl license?
–edit there is X1plus firmware which is opensourced
I have a P1S and can’t return it. What’s so bad about this new firmware?
They have their own closed firmware I think. So someone has to create a new one from scratch for each product.
I do like that my Aquilla can be modded so I can use whatever firmware (and literally any other hardware that fits) I want because it’s open source and based on the Ender 3.
