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Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

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281–290 of 367 posts

Re: Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

#281

I am angry at the bait-and-switch Bambu is pulling. I bought one of their printers in the Black Friday sale on the understanding it was reasonably hackable and open. Now they're trying to lock it down so I can't print on my own printer without using their approved software and DRM chain. It's outrageous. More info on the hacking (the first in what may be a long stupid fight): https://hackaday.com/2025/01/19/bambu-con…

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Re: Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did even worse. New firmware upgrades made older devices slower and painfully unusable: https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-might-be-slowing-down-y... And they have plenty of experience building walls around a garden. Ask anyone using OSX for the past 15 years and you will see how difficult it has become to write or publish software for Apple.

Alternate description of the same information: “newer upgrades made older devices batteries’ last longer” They did nerf speed. But they did it for a reason. I get being mad about your phone being slowed down, but i don’t get being mad about it once you understand why.

> They did nerf speed. But they did it for a reason.

That reason was to incentivize people to replace their old "slow" phones with faster new phones. If Apple actually cared about the problem of older phones having limited battery life they'd have made the batteries in their phones replaceable.

Re: Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to potentially pour oil into fire here, but I'm curious: did they really? "Officially support" printing without internet connection? Was this explicitly documented as a feature or did this just "happen to work" as you expected? A lawsuit may have some leverage to find that something could have been "reasonably expected" to work in a certain way, but that's quite uncertain territory. i.e. I would expect an Apple…

My toilet doesn't officially support crapping without an internet connection either. I'd argue that in both cases it's implicit unless very explicitly disclaimed.

How would a toilet with no electronics require an internet connection?

Re: Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

#285
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never officially supported compatibility with Orca, or Home Assistant. Vendors break compatibility with unsupported stuff all the time. Don’t make purchase decisions on unsupported features if you’re gonna get all bent out of shape about it.

They officially supported me printing without an Internet connection, which is stopping now.

You could still print without an internet connection, even before Bambu’s backpedaling.

Re: Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t really sold on the 4/4S, but I recently upgraded a 3S+ to a 4S and am amazed how much improved. The new touchscreen LCD is a huge improvement over the old two line monochrome LCD. Remote access and wife printing is a nice plus — I don’t even run OctoPi anymore. Automatic bed leveling and no more Live Z tweaking for each sheet has been a major quality of life upgrade and eliminates one of the major pain point…

wife printing sounds nice!

Heh, whoops. Definitely a typo, but in all seriousness the printer is actually usable by wife now, so that is a huge plus. She could use it before, but hadn’t learned how to adjust Live Z and thus didn’t like changing the sheet. If you do it wrong you can drive the nozzle into the sheet.

Re: Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

#287
post #41

I personally think the outrage I've seen on this issue is generally not justified. In general people are just scared of change and on top of that are playing telephone on the details of the change, assuming the worst intentions from Bambu like they're trying to be the next HP. I have seen a lot of misinformation on this topic, and I think that in that sense it's a good idea to read the actual announcement details to…

Their "update" is a bunch of hand wavy corporate PR bullshit. Their idea of "working with" the people impacted by this change is just give them a couple of days notice that they are about to be fucked over. Also the whole "it's just a beta" is such a stupid point I don't even want to respond to it. Truly idiotic. They are positioning themselves to build a proper walled garden. That entire blog post could be sumed up…

What do you mean "a couple days notice?" A couple days notice for optional beta firmware availability for only one model with other models having completely undefined release dates. This supposed "short notice" is factually inaccurate.

You can read the blog post that way if you want and insinuate the most negative possible interpretation, but I'm just going through why I choose not to do that.

For one thing, I'm failing to see how this supposed "walled garden" is going to magically materialize and benefit them financially. The best answer I get from all the alarmed people surrounding this subject is that they'll want to charge monthly fees for premium features in the software, especially to print farm owners.

But they don't operate in a competitive vacuum and that would instantly shift users to their competition. Print farm users pay off their equipment very quickly. I've seen cost breakdowns done by actual print farm operators online and the initial and ongoing machine cost is essentially the smallest part of the cost of doing business. Print farmers would pretty much switch away to other brands instantly if Bambu started charging fees for print farm scale.

If they charge even a Netflix-like fee of someting like $20/month, that essentially pays for a $1000 Prusa printer minus the cost of a Bambu printer in only 3 years. They have no room to charge monthly fees against comptetition.

Re: Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

#288
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bait-and-switch? We, those who advocate for open source 3D printers, saw it coming from miles away. This has very very clearly been their plan all along, they themselves said as much (e.g. they are doing the "apple model"). They have been very transparent about this, yet people still fell for it.

I bought a printer. It had some stuff. I didn't want that stuff to be gone after I bought it. That's a bait-and-switch, because they didn't explicitly say "be aware, that stuff is going away on Jan 2025".

I don't know how I feel about this. I hear your frustration about this. OTOH, Bambu is a walled garden approach. I also know the Prusa Core 1 is going to be less open to keep the cheap aliexpress knock-offs at bay. This could be an issue with Bambu labs as well if cheap knockoffs start appearing using reverse engineered P1Ps with modified P1P firmware.

https://hackaday.com/2024/11/20/with-core-one-prusas-open-so...

Re: Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently the only thing which won't run on a non-google blessed android build is google wallet, although a lot of applications rely on google's proprietary services exposed through google play. I've not ran into any banking applications which won't run on a non-google build of android (as then they would only run on a pixel). That being said, I refuse to seriously bank with any bank which doesn't offer a functioning…

None of the unofficial Android builds allows me to access to the secure element in my SIM card to use my e-signature, which works with SIM menu prompts triggered OTA by the application I'm currently using, mostly governmental services. If I'm on a custom ROM, the notification never pops up.

You have to have evidence that this is because of attestation, though - lots of open source software is missing lots of features because they are just missing features.

Re: Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the problem isn't that they've done it. the problem is that user got no choice. Some might prefer degraded performance, others might prefer to charge their devices more often. Also seller should have no business touching anything that they've already sold - they do might offer support, but it should be up to user to accept it or not.

It's not a matter of "charging more often". The phone just shut down when the battery was somewhere between 0-40% Source: had two 6S's in the family. In the cold it could just suddenly shut down mid-call from 60% battery.

Then the battery percentage is miscalibrated. The solution to that is to recalibrate the battery level, so that the old 40% is the new 0%.
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