Not a surprise to me though since I am operating in the CNC industry I have seen the same struggles and changes, albeit, from a slightly different perspective.
I work with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. It seems, from my observation, that most people are not working with hardware like they were a few years ago. The "homebrew" machines and shadetree makers are becoming few and far between.
The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects. Not only that but people have been convinced that they don't have the ability to make a machine.
Instead of spending time learning something new/valuable (i.e. Reprap) it is now popular to just have someone else do it...be it AI or a factory in another country with subsidies that create massive differences in bottom line.
The ability to make things at home is disappearing. People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines. Companies that make machines that care about their community and customers are disappearing.
> The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects.
I've seen what people go through when they operate 3D printers. The impression I have is that they still make 2D inkjet printers look like paragons of reliability.
I recently bought a Bambu Lab A1 printer. I went specifically with Bambu Lab because everything I read said that was the better choice if you want something low maintenance and easy to set up even if it’s not as open as some of the alternatives.
It’s stuck in the auto calibration stage. It gets halfway through then it stops with a generic error message. The UI around this is really clunky. I’ve tried searching online, asking Claude and nothing. I emailed customer support and they came back with cryptic instructions that assume familiarity with the internals of the machine.
I decided to leave this for a day when I wasn’t too mentally drained from work to debug issues in my free time and instead the machine has been collecting dust ever since.
Maybe it was a mistake to get a Bambi Lab? I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience.
Your experience is unusual for a Bambu. I know of numerous people who have purchased one and you are the only one who didn't have it "just work".
> It’s stuck in the auto calibration stage. It gets halfway through then it stops with a generic error message.
So it was dead on arrival. You should have contacted support who would have figured out if you need the whole unit replaced or just part of it. If they are not responsive enough just send back the whole thing.
What would you do if you buy a laptop and it never passes the Power-On Self-Test? I would just return it to whoever i bought it from.
> I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience.
I mean it is. For everyone who i know who owns one. Every company will sell an occasional dud.
Either it got damaged in transit, or the fault somehow escaped their QA, or you managed to screw up the assembly by not plugging in something, or leaving a transit fixture in somehow. Either way contacting support is the correct way to get to the bottom of it.
Come to think of it when i bought my Sherline lathe initially the motor didn’t turn on when i plugged it in. I wrote an email to the distributor who got me in contact with someone from Sherline. They asked me to check a thing which fixed the issue.
> So it was dead on arrival. You should have contacted support who would have figured out if you need the whole unit replaced or just part of it.
I mentioned that in my comment. I contacted CS. Multiple times in fact. They wanted to diagnose the issue remotely before issuing a refund. Their instructions were poorly written and assumed familiarity with the internals of the machine. ChatGPT helped some but not completely. Then life got busy, I had work travel and the 30 return window passed before I realized it.
Your response is, frankly, a little condescending. You seem convinced this is somehow my fault or that sat there twiddling my thumbs. Of course I understand that duds make it through manufacturing at times. It’s great that the happy path is easy. Do we judge the accessibility of a product only by how it behaves when everything goes right? I was careful during assembly and watched multiple YouTube videos and read the official instructions when putting it together, I contacted CS. In retrospect I should have pushed harder for a refund, but my original point still stands. As someone who wanted a “just works” solution, what I got instead was something faulty and then a really painful process for getting it solved.
It's condescending because there is not much to it.
Like, if the Bambu Labs printer doesn't work either you did nothing wrong and it is broken or you did something incredibly stupid. There is no in-between where e.g. knowing how to build your own Voron gives you an edge in fixing it yourself.
It sounds equally condescending to say that it is difficult to set up a Bambu Labs printer when what you are doing is actually full on fault diagnostics of the internals which you shouldn't have to do. You're allowed to complain about DOA products and terrible QA processes or bad customer support.
Obviously customer support has a perverse incentive to shift the blame onto the customer because RMAs are expensive so you got caught in the crossfire of a defective printer and the customer support.
> They wanted to diagnose the issue remotely before issuing a refund.
They were stalling you. You are in someone’s succesfull quarterly KPI metric, as a succesfully avoided return.
> You seem convinced this is somehow my fault
That the printer is not working is 100% Bambu’s fault. That they got away with it is yours.
> As someone who wanted a “just works” solution, what I got instead was something faulty
So there is a misunderstanding here. When people describe a 3d printer as “just works” they mean that it has the sensors and firmware smarts so you don’t need to become an expert to get good quality prints out of it. With previous generations of printers when the print was crap you had to look at the process and tune a ton of parameters to get it okay. Maybe your bed wasn’t flat enough? Or hot enough? Or unevenly heated? Or you needed to tweek an extrusion parameter? Or speed it up or slow it down? Or increase the hot end temp? Or increase the cooling fan rpm?
With a modern 3d printer (like the Bambu ones, but not only them) you don’t have to become an expert. Their engineers nailed down all the parameters which can be nailed down, and the rest which they can’t they added sensors for so the printer can measure them as an in-field calibration.
With the older generation of printers if it is not printing well, oh boy, you should probably get better at tuning it. With the new generation of printers if it is not printing well then the company who made the printer failed you. If it is not printing at all, because it failed the calibration then that’s the printer telling you it is broken.
It is like… imagine that you want a nice picture of your loved ones. Buying an older type of printer was like buying oil paint and a brush. You can’t just hope it will do the picture on its own. You could get the picture you wanted but you had to acquire serious skills first. No art supply shop would accept a return of your paint and brush just because the picture you paint with it are kinda crap.
In contrast buying a new generation of 3d printer is like buying a polaroid camera. It requires way less skill than the oil paint and the brush. You point, you shoot, out comes the picture. If the picture doesn’t come out the polaroid camera is broken and you should return it.
The polaroid camera is “just works” compared to the oil paint and brush even if every second camera is broken comming out of the factory. Because it is not a statement about their defect rate, but a statement about the design philosophy.
Ccecil · · focus · HN ↗
Not a surprise to me though since I am operating in the CNC industry I have seen the same struggles and changes, albeit, from a slightly different perspective.
I work with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. It seems, from my observation, that most people are not working with hardware like they were a few years ago. The "homebrew" machines and shadetree makers are becoming few and far between.
The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects. Not only that but people have been convinced that they don't have the ability to make a machine.
Instead of spending time learning something new/valuable (i.e. Reprap) it is now popular to just have someone else do it...be it AI or a factory in another country with subsidies that create massive differences in bottom line.
The ability to make things at home is disappearing. People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines. Companies that make machines that care about their community and customers are disappearing.
Maybe it's by design? I don't know.
JoshTriplett · · focus · HN ↗
I've seen what people go through when they operate 3D printers. The impression I have is that they still make 2D inkjet printers look like paragons of reliability.
fourside · · focus · HN ↗
It’s stuck in the auto calibration stage. It gets halfway through then it stops with a generic error message. The UI around this is really clunky. I’ve tried searching online, asking Claude and nothing. I emailed customer support and they came back with cryptic instructions that assume familiarity with the internals of the machine.
I decided to leave this for a day when I wasn’t too mentally drained from work to debug issues in my free time and instead the machine has been collecting dust ever since.
Maybe it was a mistake to get a Bambi Lab? I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience.
RobGR · · focus · HN ↗
mhb · · focus · HN ↗
krisoft · · focus · HN ↗
So it was dead on arrival. You should have contacted support who would have figured out if you need the whole unit replaced or just part of it. If they are not responsive enough just send back the whole thing.
What would you do if you buy a laptop and it never passes the Power-On Self-Test? I would just return it to whoever i bought it from.
> I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience.
I mean it is. For everyone who i know who owns one. Every company will sell an occasional dud.
Either it got damaged in transit, or the fault somehow escaped their QA, or you managed to screw up the assembly by not plugging in something, or leaving a transit fixture in somehow. Either way contacting support is the correct way to get to the bottom of it.
Come to think of it when i bought my Sherline lathe initially the motor didn’t turn on when i plugged it in. I wrote an email to the distributor who got me in contact with someone from Sherline. They asked me to check a thing which fixed the issue.
fourside · · focus · HN ↗
I mentioned that in my comment. I contacted CS. Multiple times in fact. They wanted to diagnose the issue remotely before issuing a refund. Their instructions were poorly written and assumed familiarity with the internals of the machine. ChatGPT helped some but not completely. Then life got busy, I had work travel and the 30 return window passed before I realized it.
Your response is, frankly, a little condescending. You seem convinced this is somehow my fault or that sat there twiddling my thumbs. Of course I understand that duds make it through manufacturing at times. It’s great that the happy path is easy. Do we judge the accessibility of a product only by how it behaves when everything goes right? I was careful during assembly and watched multiple YouTube videos and read the official instructions when putting it together, I contacted CS. In retrospect I should have pushed harder for a refund, but my original point still stands. As someone who wanted a “just works” solution, what I got instead was something faulty and then a really painful process for getting it solved.
imtringued · · focus · HN ↗
Like, if the Bambu Labs printer doesn't work either you did nothing wrong and it is broken or you did something incredibly stupid. There is no in-between where e.g. knowing how to build your own Voron gives you an edge in fixing it yourself.
It sounds equally condescending to say that it is difficult to set up a Bambu Labs printer when what you are doing is actually full on fault diagnostics of the internals which you shouldn't have to do. You're allowed to complain about DOA products and terrible QA processes or bad customer support.
Obviously customer support has a perverse incentive to shift the blame onto the customer because RMAs are expensive so you got caught in the crossfire of a defective printer and the customer support.
krisoft · · focus · HN ↗
They were stalling you. You are in someone’s succesfull quarterly KPI metric, as a succesfully avoided return.
> You seem convinced this is somehow my fault
That the printer is not working is 100% Bambu’s fault. That they got away with it is yours.
> As someone who wanted a “just works” solution, what I got instead was something faulty
So there is a misunderstanding here. When people describe a 3d printer as “just works” they mean that it has the sensors and firmware smarts so you don’t need to become an expert to get good quality prints out of it. With previous generations of printers when the print was crap you had to look at the process and tune a ton of parameters to get it okay. Maybe your bed wasn’t flat enough? Or hot enough? Or unevenly heated? Or you needed to tweek an extrusion parameter? Or speed it up or slow it down? Or increase the hot end temp? Or increase the cooling fan rpm?
With a modern 3d printer (like the Bambu ones, but not only them) you don’t have to become an expert. Their engineers nailed down all the parameters which can be nailed down, and the rest which they can’t they added sensors for so the printer can measure them as an in-field calibration.
With the older generation of printers if it is not printing well, oh boy, you should probably get better at tuning it. With the new generation of printers if it is not printing well then the company who made the printer failed you. If it is not printing at all, because it failed the calibration then that’s the printer telling you it is broken.
It is like… imagine that you want a nice picture of your loved ones. Buying an older type of printer was like buying oil paint and a brush. You can’t just hope it will do the picture on its own. You could get the picture you wanted but you had to acquire serious skills first. No art supply shop would accept a return of your paint and brush just because the picture you paint with it are kinda crap.
In contrast buying a new generation of 3d printer is like buying a polaroid camera. It requires way less skill than the oil paint and the brush. You point, you shoot, out comes the picture. If the picture doesn’t come out the polaroid camera is broken and you should return it.
The polaroid camera is “just works” compared to the oil paint and brush even if every second camera is broken comming out of the factory. Because it is not a statement about their defect rate, but a statement about the design philosophy.