In the Lord of the Rings fandom there’s a persistent debate whether balrogs, or Durin’s Bane specifically, have wings. The text in Fellowship is ambiguous whether what it is describing are literal wings or something else wing-like.
In the Lord of the Rings fandom there’s a persistent debate whether balrogs, or Durin’s Bane specifically, have wings. The text in Fellowship is ambiguous whether what it is describing are literal wings or something else wing-like.
Should the hobby continue to be about both the act of printing and tinkering with printers, or is there a reasonable place for people who want “3D printing” as a hobby but not “3D printers” as a hobby. As part of this, is it okay for a company to lock down its firmware and prevent people from using their printer over a network without going through their software first?
Bambu Lab has made remarkable progress in “mainstreaming” 3D printing but they’ve done so at the expense of a lot of the “soul” of the space. Unlike many of their consumer-facing predecessors and competitors, they are closed-source and proprietary. They make a good product, but you don’t get to have control over it the same way you do with other brands. And that just means other brands are likely to follow suit, now that Bambu Lab has shown it to be an effective strategy.
I mourn the loss of common purpose the hobby once had, but at the same time I do think it’s a natural progression for something new and complex to eventually become consumer-grade. Look at how computers have evolved into rectangles we keep in our pockets.
I think it’s like cars for car guys vs cars for people who just want to get from place to place. I started with Elegoo and got really sick of all the fiddling it took to get a decent print. I got a Bambu and it just works. I know it’s a “walled garden” but in the end I can print whatever model I want and it comes out great most of the time.
I want the printing to be the hobby, not the printer, but I also don’t want the consumer-hostile stuff that Bambu is doing to spread.
I’m stuck with an A1 mini and don’t know where to go from here. I’m not an engineer and haven’t had much luck designing anything more complex than a single static part, and I think you really have to be good at making your own stuff for a printer to be a good purchase. But at the same time I’d really like more than a 7x7x7 inch build volume.