A few weeks ago their mandatory cloud printing service had a bug and caused printers to spontaneously crash in the middle of the night, in many cases doing significant damage to the printer.
Other than that Bambu had a pretty good reputation.
> The result was that the print job was successfully completed on the printer, but our cloud service believed it had not been done. When service resumed, the once-jammed job was resent, leading to the unexpected printing of an already finished job.
That's why you make message sends in a distributed system idempotent, unless you have a really excellent reason not to. Whatever generated the print job when the user pressed “print” should have generated a unique job id, and when the printer was resent the same job id it should just have replied “Done”.
They call it a "bug", and the explanation seems plausible, but consider that a hacker could easily do the same thing.
Good thing these are only hobbyist-level machines, and AFAIK not used in any real production manufacturing. Imagine the same sort of bug (or hack) happening to CNC machines all over the world.
There's no real detail as to whether they're really trying to make whole anyone who's printer was damaged. Just the standard "contact us" type of thing:
If you were affected by this cloud outage, and your printer has suffered any damage,
please don't hesitate to contact our Support Team at Bambu Support.
So, bit hard to tell without hearing from any affected users who have contacted their support.
The cloud isn’t mandatory, it’s just necessary for some features and on by default…
That’s not the same as mandatory. I agree it’s kind of annoying and I don’t like how it’s Wi-Fi only either … but my X1Carbon is the first 3d printer after years of tinkering where I genuinely want another one instead of some other printer that’s very similar but does x, y, or z better because it’s kinda shit on the one I just got.
Do I have to use it? Or is it possible to run without it and just lose some feature I may not even need. You said mandatory so I’m assuming the answer is no.
Unfortunately if that’s the case, it’s an absolute no no for me.
Nope, and you don't lose anything that's not exclusive to the Bambu Handy app, which I believe is just manual object cancellation right now. Bambu Studio, their slicing suite for Linux, Mac, and Windows on their GitHub, can add printer in LAN Only mode.
I felt pretty strongly about not wanting cloud options, but just look at their documentation across their site, videos, and wiki. They're the opposite of that evil, dark pattern, gaslighting, contemptible shit we associate with SV tech today. They let their products do the talking, which makes it clear how much they believe in what they're building.
I cancelled my P1S Combo order because of the cloud incident, checked with colleagues with Bambus whether they were affected, and after realizing I probably fell for a little anti-Sino propaganda, bought an X1C.
I can say this with a decade of printing experience, but it's everything I imagined 3D printing would be when I first got into it. Today, we've got Ultimakers with Material Stations, every model of Creality, and the Bambus are just really thoughtful, well designed and engineered products that happen to blow everything else out of the water. It's hard not to be excited about.
Other than that Bambu had a pretty good reputation.