What can’t be found in an open source project? AI first layer inspection and lidar?
I’m not an enthusiast either, I wanted to produce my own CAD designs. And I understand not wanting to tinker with the printer. I also don’t care about that shit. But I also appreciated that I could just order parts from where ever or even print my own upgrades. I also agree that any decent printer before the Bambuu was expensive. Bambuu really punches above it’s price point.
But a lot of a printer isn’t something complicated and super fiddly that can’t be user repaired. And this style of printer started off as an open source project with maximum right to repair. But at this point, I’m convinced, that if an open source printer with absolute feature parity was released, it would fail. They would never compete on price. Ownership of your device never mattered.
All that's happened is that the audience has changed. Ownership of your device does and did matter - just not to the wider market that's now being served by the Bambu devices. The market couldn't have grown to this point without the open source printers, I'm convinced of that. And I strongly suspect that there will always be open source printers out there, and they probably will have feature parity, and they probably will be a bit more expensive, and people will say they have "failed" because they only hold a small percentage of the market, but you know what? The market will be ten times the size. Not everyone has to like the thing for the thing to be viable.
In a sense Prusa are already proving this: they're not really competing on price, and they can't build printers fast enough to satisfy demand.
> What can’t be found in an open source project? AI first layer inspection and lidar?
Not having to fuck around to assemble and use your printer.
I had the spare time and patience to maintain my printer during my university years - but now I really just want something that works out of the box, all the time, every time.
I love open-source hardware, but only in places where having to maintain it myself isn’t burdensome - and unfortunately, I’ve always treated my printer as more of a tool than as a hobby.
I’m not an enthusiast either, I wanted to produce my own CAD designs. And I understand not wanting to tinker with the printer. I also don’t care about that shit. But I also appreciated that I could just order parts from where ever or even print my own upgrades. I also agree that any decent printer before the Bambuu was expensive. Bambuu really punches above it’s price point.
But a lot of a printer isn’t something complicated and super fiddly that can’t be user repaired. And this style of printer started off as an open source project with maximum right to repair. But at this point, I’m convinced, that if an open source printer with absolute feature parity was released, it would fail. They would never compete on price. Ownership of your device never mattered.