I’ve been running mine offline for years, I don’t know why other people haven’t been. They’re the only competent and reliable printer that isn’t a project car in itself, but they’re obviously not completely trustworthy. Easily fixed with an air gap, updates work just great from a USB drive.

I tried it but switched back to the online mode because being able to remotely check in via the app is very useful to check the print hasn't failed.

Mine is now offline.

But when it was online, I never checked the app for failed prints. If the print has failed, I'll find out when I'm near enough to it to do something about it.

When offline, it amused me when there was a "hairball" and the printer detected it advising "AI Detecting Print Error".

At what level does an image analysis algorithm become "AI"?

I'm curious what concise phrase you'd display to convey the same information to that audience.

"Computer Vision Model and Nozzle Telemetry Analysis Detect Print Error"?

"Print Error Detected"?

I laughed pretty hard at this, and you're right. Problem solved.

“Print Error Detected (Maybe?)”

This isn’t a PC Load Letter we can trust!

If the print has failed you can stop it from the app to prevent it becoming a huge mess and possibly causing damage to the printer.

For previous printers, absolutely yes.

But my current Bambu? The printer has caught this every time.

afaik, these kind of image analysis/computer vision algorithms are called AI by definition. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence]

Bambuddy and tailscale was my solution to losing access to mobile app once I went lan-only. Has video stream ,monitoring and control. Plus home assistant integration via MQTT. Only thing I’m missing is the ‘AI’ spaghetti monitoring. But those are rare for me.

There's also the Openbu or LanBu android apps if you just want a basic app for monitoring from your phone like Bambu Handy did. Although if you want to access your printer from a remote network you'll still need tailscale or similar.

Another feature locked behind the app is individual part cancelling which is nice for partial print failures.

Also available in Bambuddy PWA.

Bambuddy has PWA support!

idk, my 10 year old makerbot 2 has been pretty reliable, ever since Prusa slicer came out and I tuned a profile for it maybe 6 years ago it's been spitting out quick dimensionally accurate prints. i use it all the time, probably go through a spool every month or two and all i've had to replace is the cooling fan for the extruder once

i'm mostly printing small mechanical parts and i can't say i have any complaints, i assume a modern prusa would be much better, surely there are other FDM printers that are good?

> They’re the only competent and reliable printer that isn’t a project car in itself

Prusa.

Yeah I’ve had one, still do, it never gets used because it’s a project car. Compared with one button press and coming back to a print in a few hours, it’s a constant nightmare of debugging, print issues, and manually changing filaments that aren’t stored in an airtight container and get wet. It’s not even competition, as much as I would like to support open source tools the Prusa stuff is an order of magnitude more expensive than a A1 Mini that will make a reliable print every time.

It’s like saying a bicycle is a serious contender to a train, they both have kind of similar things going on but you’d have to be insane to suggest that they do as good of a job as one another at the things people actually want to achieve.

I've done zero debugging on my Prusa and it's been pretty much fire and forget. I had one spaghetti print failure in years on it, and it was my own fault for disabling supports and the print falling over :)

Automatic filament changes would be nice for sure, I look forward to upgrading to one of their new INDX models.

They are an adversarial player in the market, actively trying to lock users into an ecosystem that is incompatible with other printers.

Like Adobe's 'creative' software and Onshape, they are working as hard as possible to make YOU pay more to have less.

When you're the best at what you do, you do what you can to fend off competition without entirely alienating users.

As long as Onshape let THEIR servers work for MY public projects for free I don't see how your "make YOU pay more" statement applies.

Same thing for the Bambu cloud. Like the feature? Use it under their terms. Don't? Use LAN mode and whatever slicer you want