- cross-posted to:
- videos@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- videos@lemmy.ml
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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.
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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.
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 had a side gig as the printer mechanic for a small company that 3D printed bracketry for their product. They used both genuine and “knockoff” (open source ftw) Prusa Mk3s. I’d kinda like to staple Josef Prusa’s foreskin to the ceiling. I think it would make him have better ideas than the extruder-and-hot-end-assembly that those machines currently have. Deal breaking issues I’ve had with them in service:
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Nothing is connectorized at the business end. If you need to replace either of the two fans, the extruder motor, the PINDA probe, the temperature sensor, the heater cartridge, you have to partially disassemble the extruder mechanism and unwrap the wiring harness. The filament runout sensor is connectorized at the tiny little board, but…
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The wiring harness passes through a hole in the back of the carriage plate and most of the wires have to fit into one of two little slots as the extruder mechanism is attached to the carriage. It’s really easy to pinch or sever wires like this, and it means you can’t replace a broken fan or something without partial disassembly.
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The PINDA probe mount is about 3 planck lengths thick. It’s subject to some load from the thickness of the PINDA probe’s cable, it’s rather near the hot end and the heat plate, so I’ve seen them warp or break under continuous use. And it’s built into a foundational part of the mechanism so it’s not a quick swap, it’s a 100% teardown and rebuild from scratch.
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The whole thing is a demented sandwich with like 25 printed plastic parts. It’s a convoluted thing to work on, even if it’s not printed in gloss black so you can make out the shape of everything. But they print it in gloss black.
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It’s not designed to be built up as an assembly that can be easily and quickly attached and detached from the printer. In service, this makes it impossible to have a spare extruder assembly built up so when you get “Number 3 needs a new nozzle” you can swap in the spare assembly, return the machine to service, and then work on the part at your leisure. No, the production manager is breathing down your neck with a machine in many pieces. Hand me my stapler, I just want to talk to him.
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Those goddamn pressed in square nuts. If you want to re-use the hardware because one of the many plastic pieces partially broke in a way that means you HAVE to replace it, re-using the hardware is just one more jumper cable to the cornea.
It’s not specific to the Extruder mechanism, but because nothing is connectorized at the business end, you end up having to open the main board’s enclosure and dealing with shit in there, and there isn’t room. It’s turned the wrong way; the connectors and shit should be on the OUTSIDE of the printer so you could get to them easier and most of the cover should hinge or bolt off.
For an 8-bit AVR-based Mendel pattern machine they work surprisingly well when they’re in good shape but they are a PAIN IN THE TAINT to keep running in a production environment. I have the skills to do better than this but I’m not doing it for free.
Ouchie. OK, I get all that, not gonna argue.
But I’m in a completely different position as a hobbyist, I have completely different criteria.
Thanks for sharing!
Some of this I think still goes for hobbyists if they plan to buy the printer as a kit. The first (of like, eight) Prusas I built I had a hell of a time assembling the extruder mech because it’s not designed to be easy or sane to assemble, I still pinched wires, not bad enough to break anything but still. And I had built several 3D printers and a couple laser engravers prior to this.
And that PINDA probe mount is still hilariously delicate.
As a hobbyist machine that will spend most of its time powered off, they’re fine. For their gantry mechanism and the 8-bit control board, they’re surprisingly high quality if slightly slow printers.
Oh there’s another thing: The Prusa community is in the bad habit of sharing G-Code rather than STLs, because everyone everywhere has the same printer, right?
My personal printer is still my first manually leveled Folger 2020 i3 with some customization of mine, and I don’t need another.
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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
Leopards ate your face. May open source thrive
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
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.
