I was considering a Bambu till this…what are good alternatives. Within $3k
There’s an open source firmware for the X1
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/14513874
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
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.
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.
I just got their new 3d printer and was having a great time with it… Won’t be updating firmware or buying anymore products with them until they fix this
Are you also preventing it from automatically getting an update?
They don’t automatically update.
Unless that’s something new, mine has never updated automatically, it always asks me.
Rossman pointed out that they said they’re going to stop you from printing if you don’t upgrade the firmware. Maybe a timeout built in?
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
They have their own closed firmware I think. So someone has to create a new one from scratch for each product.
Prusa for the win yet again. I recently upgraded to MK4, and the thing just keeps. On. Going. Great customer support. They work with 3rd party suppiers instead of against them. Worth every cent.
Yep, and the fact you can upgrade to new versions is amazing, only paying for the new parts, not a whole new printer.
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.
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.
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.
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
thank you for making me aware of this, and thank fuck for louis rossman. no idea how we deserve that guy. as a new BL printer owner, I just opened a complaint on their websites support portal, as advised by this reddit post
Open source followers: what are bambulabs fans wondering about? It was clear from the beginning that closed source would end up like this and that the buyers would massively harm the open source community and the 3d print community.
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.
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.
there’s a LAN only option. I enabled it today.
Do you trust it to not “phone home” anyway?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Leopards ate your face. May open source thrive
They’re run by a bunch of former DJI execs, the spy drone company.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
I was worried that Bambu would try to pull the same crap that Dymo did with their label printers.
