My daughter is an architecture student and needed a 3d printer to help with making models for her studio class. She had no desire to learn the ends and outs of 3d printers. She wanted something easy to use and reliable. The Bambu Labs printer I bought her has been just that.

i tossed my ender 3 for this reason alone. it’s just not worth the headache. it’s like the physical manifestation of vim, endless ways to tweak it and you could get lost with the tool instead of getting anything done. and i don’t even have a replacement, i’d rather have nothing than have a headache inducer

I’m about to toss my ender 3 s1 pro. The damn print won’t adhere to the bed. Z-probe calibration, temp towers, bed leveling, wash the plate, use a glue stick, turn the fan down, increase flow rate. I’ve tried it all. Still get spaghetti when I try to print a catamaran toy for my kid.

Ironically I started using orcaslicer recently. It seems cool. But I really just want a working printer. Probably getting a bambu in spite of the angry noises online.

If you don’t print anything proprietary or private, sure go ahead. You can let them intercept your 3d files all day and not be worried when you encounter models they decide they don’t want you to print with your printer in the future. (And trust me, that is ABSOLUTELY what is coming; monitoring everything you print and blocking you from printing anything they — Bambu or Government — deem you shouldn’t be allowed to print.)

That is my issue. I’m not printing guns or anything unsafe. I also don’t know what could happen in the future; it’s not like we get to govern ourselves (unless you buy into that lie). So given that, I’d rather stick with something that won’t have the capacity to stop me from using it later, for any reason.

The developer mode everyone loves to point out only came after massive community backslash to the fact that they made you unable to print without the Cloud. It wasn’t something they planned to add, it was an afterthought added only to quell the complaints and negative press which they can easily take away later again with an OTA firmware update (and have already demonstrated they are willing to).

You might call that noise, I call that a legitimate concern on being able to use the product I bought and paid for in the future. It’s good to be informed of what the “noise” is really about, since people like to marginalize concerns they dismiss or don’t understand. Best of luck with your purchase!

I ended up getting that Bambu X2D right after I wrote that comment, and what do you know, the catamaran printed on its first try with the same filament that I was using before. I did set up developer/LAN mode and integrated it with Home Assistant and it's great (for now). If they stealth patch out LAN mode while my printer is in LAN mode I will eat my words, tolerate the cloud nonsense as long as I can, and replace it with another printer if it gets bad.

But for now I have a fantastic printer for the price. Prusa was my second choice but you can't get X2D-equivalent functionality even if you were willing to do everything possible to upgrade it.

Ok but if this is your argument, you could have pointed out that thanks to Bamboo labs the Chinese 3d printer companies had to radically change their product designs to the point where you can get good printers from other companies rather than lash out at Bamboo Labs. If you don't like them then it would be better for them to fade into irrelevance. I just don't get this obsession. I personally would rather buy a Snapmaker U1 because it is a better printer architecture than dual nozzles.

That you characterize it as obsession says more about your pre-established opinion that it is irrelevant, than what the facts are. Good for you, buy what you want? What were you hoping for there?

The maintenance needed is minimal, and Bambu make it easy to learn in their wiki. It even sends you reminders to lubricate the Z-axis (the others don't need it). I've never had a clogged nozzle on my bambu printers but that is also clearly documented.

I've been doing 3D printing for 15 years so I've been through all the heavy maintenance printers. But most of that knowledge I don't need anymore. First layers are always perfect as long as the bed is properly grease free. The only knowledge I still really need is the design for 3D printing, like overhang orientations, seams etc.

That hasn't been my experience. Bambu's documentation, including the guides and wiki, is disjointed and inconsistent. You'll often find contradictions between pages or information that isn't appropriately fleshed out. Sometimes bits and pieces on a topic are spread across several wiki pages and guides. You'll also find that there's now an increase in AI slop in some of the introductory guides (e.g., tons of emdashes and sentences that don't seem to make sense).

Having the printer give you reminders to do something doesn't mean that maintenance is minimal.

Outside of Prusa - how would you compare Bambu's documentation against it's competitors?

In my experience, having owned 2-other printers prior to an X1C - there is absolutely NO comparison - EVERYTHING was community, Reddit, forum or random YouTube guidance from non-manufacturers.

The most common failure in my printing experience is just plain old dirty bed, especially when human hands interact with it. That takes operational discipline especially if you're printing lot of models over time.

I honestly get that, architecture is such a time intensive degree. It is drilled into you to produce results more than to care about the process.. and to spend more time on exploration and resolution than on learning.

I do think though, that a little learning and understanding of your tools is such a useful thing practically and creatively speaking, but also ultimately time saving.

Slow, as they say, is fast.

Not getting an Elon Musk seems like a massive positive.

Nationalized healthcare systems can reap the longterm savings from preventive care. I have had 4 different for profit insurance companies over the last 5 years because of job changes, my employer switching insurance providers and retirement. Such frequent changing of health insurance providers means that there is no guarantee that any insurance company will reap the benefit of providing me with better preventative care than required by law.

If they are drivers for devices from the last century which nobody even uses anymore why keep them in the kernel when they, as shown by LLMs, are potential sources of security vulnerabilities? Seems more logical to take the action being taken and remove them.

I like OpenBSD for that. If there's something that no one uses and wants to maintain, it's removed. That happened with the bluetooth driver. It was too complicated and no one missed it enough to add it back.

I'm in the US and it is far from amazing for me.

To get to my home you take an exit off a toll road and where the exit splits continuing straight or going to the right you continue straight to a stop light where you take a left and in 1/4 mile take a right into my neighborhood. Apple Maps will tell you to go to the right instead of going straight merging on the road and continuing through 2 stop lights, taking a u-turn at a 3rd light and then backtracking to take the right into my neighborhood. Google Maps gives the correct directions.

In the closest major city Apple Maps will give directions instructing you to perform u-turns on streets where u-turns are legal but practically impossible. Google Maps will instead correctly direct you so such risky u-turns are not needed and you actually arrive quicker.

That is just two examples. I have many more I could provide.

Has your Apple account been suspended for the last few years?

Respectfully the scenario you want to present seems to change. The title you submitted this under doesn’t have any mention of switching, firewalls, dhcp server or WiFi access point.

Then the actual title of the article mentions routing and switching but not a firewall, dhcp server or WiFi access point. Then at the end you seem to change the goal to being a WiFi router but really you have presented more steps than required for that. You have also setup switching, a firewall and a dhcp server which are not required to be a router with WiFi access point.

>> spectfully the scenario you want to present seems to change.

Man that is totally a fair point.

I feel like I’ve struggled with the tutorials on these configs so many times in my life that I’ve kind of munged several ideas together here. There’s so much subtlety to the iptables/nftables rules that I failed to understand for so long, that I forgot that some folks might not understand that WiFi has specific weirdness. You’re right- I open with routing as a topic, but I’m in a very specific nuance right away.

There were also PC compatible systems based around ISA backplanes. This was especially common for industrial computers but Zenith/Heathkit made ISA backplane based systems for the business and consumer markets. I own a Zenith Z-160 luggable computer from 1984 which uses an 8 slot 8-bit ISA backplane. 1 slot is occupied by a CPU card which also has the keyboard connector. My system has 2 memory cards which each provide up to 320k along with a serial and parallel port. Zenith sold a desktop version of this as the Z-150. They later released models based upon 16-bit ISA backplanes. I think but am not sure of the top of my head that the last CPU they produced a 16-bit card for was the 486.

There are greasemonkey scripts available which hide shorts from appearing.

I don’t have an EV and will not purchase one anytime soon. I would be interested in purchasing an extended range hybrid. I’ve had this discussion with many of my friends and most are not ready to purchase an EV but like myself are interested in a plug-in hybrid. A 100 range allow for all my local driving to be electric and I could still do my long range driving without adding the additional time for charging. I do drives of 9 - 13 hours at least 8-10 times a year and some years more often. Those drives are already long enough. I don’t want to add the additional time charging takes. Over that long of a drive the time adds up.