Comment by reactordev
Comment by reactordev 3 days ago
Now if we can only get an offline printer…
Comment by reactordev 3 days ago
Now if we can only get an offline printer…
Yes, you can use the P1S offline, but they've done everything possible to make it hard: crappy micro sd interface without the ability to use folders, USB plug absolutely inaccessible (see if you can even find it) and then, once you've found it it turns out that there is absolutely no way to use it to print with. They push you towards their closed source plugin 'for your benefit'. Fuck that stuff. There is absolutely no way I'm going to run a Chinese built piece of software that I can not inspect on my desktop. FOSS or bust.
I'm curious - which firmware version are you on? Just yesterday I got confused when I accidentally entered the "cache" folder (Handy sliced models?) on my P1S, so it looks like my machine definitely supports folders at least. I am located in the UK and bought it late 2025.
AFAIK, the hidden internal USB port is intended to charge a phone/other device used as a "touch controller".
I don't like their closed-source control and the way they've managed local integrations, but I also want to accelerate making things with a printer that just "prints" (akin to how some will buy into the Apple ecosystem for something that "just works"). I've now sold my previous open-source Klipper/Mainsail printer which I heavily modified.
If/when Bambu makes their ecosystem unbearable for me, I will switch away (probably to a Prusa). For now, the ease of use of the machine has led to much more things being made as I can trust it to work accurately and reliably.
Yes, this is the dilemma right now. I have 30+ prusa's and 43 Bambu's and another dozen or so K1s. They all have their quirks, weaknesses and strong sides but for sheer reliability and volume you can't beat the Bambus. But for development work I'd much rather have the oldest bedslinger that I have because it is so incredibly precise, even if it is terribly slow as well. K1 I would not recommend for anything, too fragile and too irregular from one machine to another, each is a different printer. To get to that level of lack of consistency must have taken some real thinking.
I'm not so sure. You've had people insisting that, or how they'll lock it to only their own NFC tagged filaments but lets be real, if they start imposing serious restrictions most purchases would go to other makers.
They make solid enough devices sure, but they dont exactly have a moat that would keep users buying their stuff if it were to start getting locked down. They have far more to lose than they have to gain doing so.
Kinda funny how things have progressed...
I work with the Smoothieware project. The V1 Smoothieboard was one of the first with ethernet onboard (although kinda borked). First thing that was advised to everyone was "never connect this to anything outside your local network"
Nowadays...it seems that warning has been lost. Even in the face of firmware updates that caused physical damage.
Something to be said for building your own printer.
Elegoo printers can be offline - you can run everything from the machine itself, as long as you have your model/s on a thumb drive. Or is that not what you mean?
They’re trying to introduce legislation that would require 3D printers to be online so that if you try to print a firearm, it won’t let you…
Granted, today, you can print offline.
Tomorrow? A firmware update might just brick it the next time it goes online or won’t be able to read the grbl
These people are so ridiculous. It'll fail on 1A and 2A grounds, not to mention challenges implicit from 4A and 5A considerations. They can't ban arbitrary information, even dangerous information, and there's a presumption of regularity - you're presumed innocent of wrongdoing absent evidence, so they can't legislate the assumption of criminality by default. They can't ban private creation of firearms and weapons, so long as other aspects of the law are being followed. They can't assert control over private property and mandate being online, this is equivalent to a warrantless search of private home activity. Arbitrary compliance costs and increased prices can amount to violations of 5A takings clause, and you can't bake in a violation of your right to refuse to incriminate yourself, especially with the vague, subjective nature of the proposed legislation. There's also 5A due process concerns, with the legislation being overbroad and arbitrary. 14A presents equal protections and lays the basis for discrimination between hobbyists and manufacturers and interstate commerce concerns.
The whole notion is about as anti-American and authoritarian as laws get, I don't see it as anything more than political grandstanding, and even if Washington passes it with statewide, unanimous endorsement, it won't last a year before 9th circuit court strikes it down on purely 2A grounds.
They are just stupid. The WA state has a problem with a growing number of shootings, so the reps need to show that they are "doing something".
Meanwhile, the legal system in WA requires 5 (five) arrests for juveniles to be given _any_ jail time for gun crimes. And the laws regarding the unlawful possession of a weapon are almost completely unenforced.
Sigh. I'm pretty pro-gun-regulation, but I just can't stand our legislators' furious virtue signaling.
This reminds me of William Gibson's "The Peripheral" in which the protagonist runs a rural 3D print shop where everything has to be licensed and government approved. We live in the near future.
Right to repair.
Right to use.
I don’t think a company should have a say in what you do with their product after you have purchased it. Whether you intend to print firearms or not. The acts of the few should not withhold liberty of the many.
I would add right to build. I have built my 3D printers and i control the firmware. No need to go online.
How would it know what is a firearm and what isn't? Seems trivial to defeat for someone who knows CAD, no?
They'll just run it through BigBrotherGPT, a CAD aware multimodal censorship bot specially trained to recognize Bad Things that must not be printed. And while this is sarcastic, it also occurs to me that it's also really, really achievable. OpenAI could probably whip one up in a weekend office hackathon.
That’s the tricky part of this whole mess. Online servers would have to mesh and volume your model and determine if it matches a likeness of any known models. So much for printing NERF.
I don’t think this will pass as is but it shows you where lawmakers heads are. They would rather brick your capability than do actual policing.
And work really well until you have more than 20 files or so after which it becomes impossible to manage the SD. Your best bet here is to have a stack of SDs of what you'd normally put in folders. Really nice, especially given how easy it is to write on the outside of a micro-sd what the contents are.
I bought a bambu p1s recently and it can be used entirely offline.
You can import models to orcaslicer (open source), do your slicing, and export the g code file to SD card.
If you want to skip the SD card, block the printer's mac/ip address at the firewall and set up WiFi. Then send the print directly from orcaslicer.
That being said, my gut says bambu is going to slowly require a persistent connection to the cloud at some point. Maybe they think they are an EV car company.