Bambu Lab Lockdown: Final Post

I don't want to beat a dead horse, so I'll wrap up here unless something truly novel happens. And this will mostly be a reflection and some advice.

Firstly, there was an interview on The Verge where BBL answered some questions. It sounds like they may have some plans for some future line ups and they can't commit to how they will treat those products. I think this sounds like fairly generic business speak. They have more or less promised to not lock down current products behind a paywall or anything like that and promised to leave Developer Mode intact.

To me, that is "sufficient". It is definitely not a great answer though. Orca Slicer would tend to agree it seems as they refuse to support the Connect app. And this will mean a loss of functionality for some. For most, I think Bambu Studio is likely good enough. 

That being said, I think BBLs response has left enough of a desire in the community to make a BIQU control board a lot more likely. And I suspect it will be wildly successful if they do so. They had made them for the CR6-SE and seemed reasonably successful there. And that was a much smaller community for a much cheaper printer. I never made the jump because the board was half the cost of the printer and mine still works fine. If my board had fried though, I would have jumped on it pretty quickly.

The P1S on the other hand? With the AMS it set me back over $1000CAD. I'm not sure it would take too much to convince me. And X1 users would typically have paid even more for their printers. In short, it is a much bigger investment and people are more incentivized to upgrade and maintain them.

And that rolls into my advice; if you bought the printer and love it and only use Bambu Studio... you're golden. You can gripe about the direction the company is potentially taking, but there is no need to overreact.

For those who would lose something, the advice would be to stay on the current firmware as long as you can and then wait and see if BIQU does anything.

If you feel strongly and want to act anyway? Try and re-sell the printer. There are alternatives now with multi-color systems. Not a ton, but they exist. 

For me, I'm fine between Bambu Studio and the SD card for the calibration stuff from Orca Slicer. I'm not installing that Connect non-sense and will likely not upgrade the firmware any time soon. If BIQU makes a new control board to enable Klipper or Marlin or the likes, I will definitely take it seriously. Even though I don't NEED the freedom, I certainly appreciate it and some of the functionality could be better.