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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Lol knew it was only a matter of time before bambu did something stupid. Always had a funny feeling about them in the back of my head, like too good to be true.
Never go proprietary when great open source alternatives exist, honestly people who bought Bambu deserve what they’re gonna get.
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
I have no regrets with my fine European Prusa printers.
If they ever advertised a use case for it, then took that use case away, they can be sued. My most recent memory if the class action against Sony when they dropped Linux support on the PS3.
A lawsuit would be the cost of doing business. They’ll raise prices by $10 to make up the loss. For reference, Sony sold 87.4 million PS3’s at a $500 each. That’s $43 Billion dollars. Sony had to pay a grand total of $3.75 million to settle the suit. That’s 0.007% of sales.
There’s an open source firmware for the X1
Wish there was a version for the A1… Regretting my blackfriday purchase…
The more people that get involved with it, then the more printers it would support
Installing right now.
I originally had thought, “I mean I always have that option”. Now it’s clear that option may disappear at any time.
And done. Seems their servers are overloaded. The unlock confirmation page looped for a while til it finally let me through to choose my printer and unlock it.
Also, just fyi. https://www.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/comments/1h2wa56/send_files_from_orcaslicer_without_network_plugin/ Pandaprint is a nice shim that allows ditching the Bambu Labs network plugin in orcaslicer. Planning to review and then stand this up tonight.
As a relatively new X1C owner and a noob to the hobby, thank you for sharing this. I installed it a few hours ago and it seems to be working basically just as good as bambu’s firmware as far as I can tell.
I’m going to be going with X1Plus and OrcaSlicer from here on out, because this shit from bambu lab ain’t cool.
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.
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?
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.
Do they really think they are that mainstream now that they can pull the “fuck you” switch? You’re still almost exclusively patronized by the people that can actually read and think, bambu. Your customer will decidedly act against your broken business now. Enjoy.
This is Reddit, but if you want to hear from the asshole making decisions and see their username. https://www.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/comments/zmz8vv/i_am_dr_ye_tao_ceo_of_bambu_lab_ask_me_anything/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This is a risk with any item that requires software to function. Companies can change software licensees, lock-in buyers, and even open source can flat out abandon a project.
I just bought a Bambu Mini to sit along side my trusty 6 year old Mk3s+ and this pisses me off to no end. I was expecting my mini to simply be abandoned rather than suffer a lock-in AND then abandonment. So, I guess I won’t be updating my firmware nor will I run anything through their cloud. I was thinking of uploading a few designs to their cloud. But that ain’t going to happen now.
To comment on one of your points, something that gets lost when people learn about open source (at least most traditional licenses): nobody can change the license of something that was released so you have the option to fix it yourself or hire someone else to do it for you. While it’s incredibly powerful thing to have, many people only look at open source as “free (as in beer) stuff with free support”. Thing is, even if there’s no chance in earth you’ll fix it yourself, it’s likely someone out there who’s in the same situation will do it and make available for others. Key here is having popular and open enough hardware that people can replace or the software completely or keep its development (if open).
As open source printers go, you can always use the parts to convert it to a different printer but that requires tinkering. Perhaps this move will piss off enough some Bambu users that they’ll make the switch away from the “I just want something that works” mindset into tinkers.
There are licenses can be changed. Even you admit it.
This is a risk with any item that requires software to function.
Absolutely not true, it’s only a risk on products with cloud dependencies. Which is exactly why I ensure every electronic device I own doesn’t have that.
