Looks like Bambu is getting more enshittified. I am so glad I didn’t let my recent frustration at my clumsiness with my Prusa steer me into Bambu-land.
Looks like Bambu is getting more enshittified. I am so glad I didn’t let my recent frustration at my clumsiness with my Prusa steer me into Bambu-land.
Qidi.
I’ve owned two and they’ve been very nearly completely turn-key (the OG X-Plus) and absolutely completely turn-key (my current X-Max 3). Their bigger machines are fully enclosed and have active chamber heaters to manage pain in the ass materials like ABS and ASA, and even polycarbonate.
They have their “own” slicer but it’s just a mildly breathed upon fork of Prusaslicer with built in presents and which has all the plugins for remotely administering their machines already included. You can use stock Prusaslicer, Cura, or Orca with them if you prefer. The boards just run Klipper. You have terminal access, and you can hack the machine however you want if that’s your jam.
Their upcoming gen 4 machines promise compatibility with an AMS-like “Qidi box” filament exchanger system, although the details of that remain unspecified at the moment. If you want multimaterial now they have a true dual extruder model also.
As of yet, there’s no lockdown, no cloud bullshit (to be fair they do now have some kind of cloud bullshit platform available, but it’s entirely optional and I’ve never touched it or even bothered to look at it), nothing proprietary, and so far there have been no rug-pulls on any of the above.
A friend of mine was gifted an X-Smart 3, cool little machine. I’ve been tutoring himb on printing, then the other day he texted me, distraught, that the machine had broken down, displaying a Klipper serial error; told him not to worry, we’d fix it… He didn’t really believe me, but once there I just ssh’d into it from his computer (thank God Windows has PowerShell nowadays), found out that his printer.cfg had been zeroed! I extracted a copy from an update file, used scp to transfer it, et voilà, back in business.
Now, it’s disappointing that this happened at all, but the openness of the device allowed for a quick repair that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
My Ender 3 V3 SE is happily printing ABS currently with not much of a chamber, more two lack tables with some printed parts and some half finished walls. Yet to print ASA but I’m confident my jank is upto it.
Admittedly the AMS made me interested, I’ll have to look over Qidi’s range.
ASA is no different from ABS when it comes to printing
I’m very interested in that, since it has Klipper. Looks comparable to the Bambu and with the heated chamber for ABS, that’s a win. I have no need for multicolor printing, I’m definitely going to put this on the list.
Thanks.