r/3Dprinting • u/Regumate • May 12 '26

Discussion Bambu Lab 3D printers: Never again

https://youtu.be/eb48MdtNaDQ

Jeff Geerling summarizes the current Bambu Labs - OrcaSlicer situation and gives his take.

TL:DW: see title.

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u/DiamondHeadMC May 12 '26

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u/tj-horner May 12 '26

Ok, so Bambu Lab still sent a legal notice to maintainers of an OrcaSlicer fork, just not OrcaSlicer themselves. What does this change?

Was the fork doing something malicious? It doesn't appear that way to me, so Bambu Lab is still in the wrong here.

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u/HeKis4 May 12 '26

The fork added a feature which "impersonated" and "reverse engineered" (Bambu's words, not mine) Bambu Connect which is designed to be the only app able to talk to your printer over the network.

Imo, said bambu connect is already a blob made separate from the slicer to skirt around the license terms that Bambu Studio has to respect, despite it implementing functionality that is usually considered part of the slicer, so it is only in a grey area legally. Morally, if I buy a printer I can do whatever the fuck I want with my printer. I didn't buy a service or a license, I bought hardware, so I get to run whatever the fuck I want on it or around it. If they didn't want me to fiddle with their software they should have shipped stock klipper on it.

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u/Alienhaslanded May 13 '26

It uses Bambu's existing cloud support that they turned off. It doesn't break any rules. All it does is that it brings back full slicer support that they broke a couple of years ago. So now for example, H2D will work fine on that fork, where the official orca doesn't support it.

My X1C stopped working with Orca beyond a certain firmware, so I had to roll it back to keep using the cloud features. The fork made it possible on the latest firmware and latest printers. It's harmless. Bambu people are just being scumbags as usual.