Bambu Lab printer owners - Bambuddy

[Tony4597]

Recently came across this application for Bambu lab printers and having a play with it:
https://bambuddy.cool/

On a personal note I have never been too concerned about using Bambu labs 'partially closed and proprietary ecosystem'. Happy to print on my P1S using either Bambu Studio or Orca Slicer. Although I have drawn the line on updating to recent firmware as I believe that would lock out using Orca so you would need to enable LAN mode and Developer mode.

It seems to be most useful for those with more than one printer and ideal for a print farm. However it looks like it may offer useful features to even single printer owners?

What do you think?

 

[Nifty]

I haven't been too worried about it either because I never print anything that's super proprietary, etc., and don't have a lot of strong feelings about this topic.

I'm trying to remember if that was the tool that Bamboo Lab tried to get shut down and then got in a bunch of trouble with the community, and it caused a ton of negative press?

 

[Tony4597]

I love my Bambu Printer and am thinking of getting another possibly an H2? as I suspect the H3's will be at a price point I am not comfortable with.

Still I think that Bambu Labs actions are somewhat foolish and potentially harmful to their current and future sales.

They have in my opinion become the Apple of the 3d printing world by similarly creating a strict ecosystem to control and limit access.

I believe the tool you mentioned was the one developed by Pawel Jarczak which Bambu Lab targeted stating reverse engineering and code breaking etc. I think this came from Toms Hardware site:

Jarczak said in a note on GitHub that Bambu Lab threatened him with a cease and desist letter and accused him of reverse engineering its software in order to impersonate Bambu Studio. He said he was also accused of violating Bambu’s Terms of Use and bypassing authorization control. He chose to voluntarily remove the software. He insists he did nothing wrong as his fork of Orca only used publicly available source code.

“I explicitly pointed out that, according to Bambu Lab's own explanation, the reason the method still worked was simply that they had not disabled that path yet. In other words, the behavior they objected to was, by their own description, still possible within the Linux-side workflow they had not yet changed,” Jarczak wrote.

He also pointed out that Bambu Studio is publicly released under the AGPL-3.0 license, a “copyleft” Open Source license that PrusaSlicer uses. As Bambu Studio uses PrusaSlicer’s code as its foundation, it must allow the core program to remain open source.

The difference is that Bambuddy takes advantage of the the Developer Mode which was introduced by Bambu likely due to the community backlash over cloud reliance and locked firmware. So the application works within the official Bambu "Lab Developer Mode" and therefore Bambu Lab has to accept or at least tolerate it!

Of course there is still a risk that Bambu could push a future update that changes how this all works. If they do change and do not allow future access then I think they would be committing commercial suicide