[jrockway]

Yeah, the cloud nature of Bambu is kind of something looming over the community's head. They have RFID readers in the filament holder. The software's not open source. They already had an incident where jobs sent to the printer got held for several hours (so the printer turned on when they cleared the queue, which might have been unexpected).

It just doesn't seem worth the lock-in risk to me. I will continue to buy printers from Prusa, even though they have zero interest in managing the supply chain. (Still have to import them from Europe, even though they bought a US-based retailer? Weird stuff. But I like them so I will give them a large benefit of the doubt.)

[margor]

RFID reader is not a thing when you don't use AMS (for multi color printing). RFID is used to identify the filament, otherwise you just have to set it manually on what did you load to which holder.

[regularfry]

That's one shitty CEO change away from "your AMS will only work with our filament" and they've already sold you the hardware to do it.

[iancmceachern]

This problem has been solved on other printers. The dimension has been "jailbroken". Yoi can buy the rfid chips, reprogram them, people sell already done ones and even complete knock off filament cartridges.

It's just like ink jet printers, you say this will be a problem but it just won't, the community will solve it for you.

[function_seven]

Are the RFID tags available to filament makers? Can I order some myself so I can put them on other spools?

[iancmceachern]

Yes, apparently there are places where you can buy the tags.

Here us a good thread on the whole thing:

https://github.com/Bambu-Research-Group/RFID-Tag-Guide

[function_seven]

Thanks for that link. It’s cool that people are hacking on this thing. But my question should have ended with “from Bambu?”

This sentence from your link…

> Since we don't know how Bambulab will react on this guide and the general reverse engineering of the tags: Please don't share you tag's UID and the related keys for now.

…means the answer is “no”. That the RFID system is meant to drive sales of their own inkjet cartri—er, I meant filament spools.

People have hacked the Keurig 2 coffee pod system, people have reverse-engineered Lexmark’s toner control system. Neither of those initiatives made me a more likely to purchase from Keurig or from Lexmark.

[iancmceachern]

That sentence does not mean that.

That sentence means, we (the hackers) have no idea what BambuLab (the company that makes this printer) is going to do in the future, so please don't do things that would help them make it harder for us to hack these RFIDs in the future.

Yes, but what ink jet printer did you buy?

In this case, this printer prints 4x as fast with 2x the quality of all the competitors on the market. Would you then still not buy it based in this theoretical, hypothetical, future con?

[function_seven]

My interpretation of that quoted sentence is the same as yours. That’s my point. The RFID system is a kind of vendor lock-in, and I don’t go for that.

If the RFID system was truly meant to improve the user experience, Bambu would offer it to other filament producers to make it a standard, and really make it useful to the user.

I gave up on consumer inkjet printers because they all seem to be wildly expensive on the consumables. I have a Brother laser now that is still using the same toner it came with 10 years ago. I do not have an account with brother.com.

I know this printer is bad-ass, technically. If that was something I needed to optimize for, I would probably hold my nose and get one. I might actually still do that!

But for now, my existing Monoprice printer still works, and it respects me as a user.