I've been dabbling in a bit of DIY project electronics and wanted to design a few enclosures, but didn't want to send out to have something printed or mold injected and then have it not be what I wanted. So, instead, I decied it made more sense to spend a hundreds of dollars on a 3D printer.

It turns out that my timing was perfect, cause there is a company called Bambu Lab that is making 3D printing super accessible for those who are just starting out. If you remember ten years ago when 3D printing became popularized, you'll remember how difficult it was to get into and maintain a printer. Now, you can just buy one and set it up in about 15 minutes and start printing.

I was having a blast with my Bambu Lab A1 Mini. It printed perfectly¹ with barely any tweaking. So many good Benchies.

One day I was browsing 3D printing videos on Youtube and started noticing that a lot of people actually despise Bambu Lab because of their closed-source model and other various things that I'm too lazy to type. I sat wondering if I made a mistake with buying this printer.

The quick answer is "no", because the printer does exactly what I want it to do. I didn't want to adopt a new hobby of needing to heavily maintain and tweak my printer to get it to make a nice print, or spend a whole lot of time learning how it actually works. Improving my CAD and being able to print things is enough for now, and because I understand the world of open source, I am open to doing this in the future. If I decide to go for a larger printer, I will most likely try to build my own (Voron?). This could happen sooner than later if Bambu takes even more extreme choices with firmware updates and such. Do they want to stare at me through the 1fps camera on the printer???

I imagine that this is how people feel when they look at Linux or other open source software. Sometimes you don't have time to dive into another hobby and just want the convenient solution, and sadly, the free (as in freedom) path is rough. When you're not really invested in the technology of a device, it is a bit difficult trying to see the reasons for FOSS/HW. I'm not really an expert at all in the 3D printing space, more so an observer, so I can't really give any more insight...but it does feel like I'm using the MacOS of 3D printers and a Prusa or another DIY would be some Linux distro...shivers

¹ PLA...PETG was stringing hard since I had no dryer.