3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
Rules
-
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
-
Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
-
No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
-
No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
-
Do not create links to reddit
-
If you see an issue please flag it
-
No guns
-
No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe/ may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is 
Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible
view the rest of the comments
Damn, I naively bought an A1 a few months ago for my first 3d printer. "Easy for beginners" was really all I knew about them at the time
I have an A1 too, and when the news came out that third-party slicers (like OrcaSlicer, which I was and still am using) were going to be blocked, I set my printer to LAN only mode. I wouldn't recommend a Bambu to newbies to 3D printing anymore, but I'm stuck with mine and it has been printing ok. Like any printer, it struggles with overhangs and such, it's not always a magic "it just works" experience".
Bambu Lab printers to me are for the people who don't care about tinkering on their printer as a hobby, and just want to print things without fuss. Stay in their Apple-like ecosystem and their cloud environment and you'll be perfectly happy. If you want the printer itself to be the hobby, there are a number of similar spec devices that with some tinkering can work just as well.
What are my options if I don't want the printer itself to be the hobby, and I just want to print without fuss, but I also don't want to deal with all that vertical integration crap?
Well, the most open you can get is Prusa's machines. Repairable, upgradeable, with great customer service to boot.
Other companies are more open than Bambu but few support the open-source movement like Prusa. Qidi, Elegoo, etc. all have great printers that I can recommend (Q2 and Centauri Carbon are fantastic options based on feature set) but they don't use a very open firmware. They are compatible with OrcaSlicer and aren't as bad as Bambu though.
You're also giving money to a company that has completely screwed all the people who made 3d printing possible by a culture of open sharing.
They are... My daughter wanted one for Christmas last year because she's into cosply and it works great out of the box for someone who has no idea about 3d printing....
But from what I've read on here it's not the best company because of all the proprietary shit they keep coming up with.
For what daughter uses it for, it does the job and does it well...