Bambu Has A Big Week: Rogue 3D Printers And A New Model Repository

This has been a big news week for the 3D printer company Bambu Labs. Some of it was pretty bad and some of it could be pretty good. Let’s get that bad news out of the way first.

Rogue printing due to cloud services

Recently, many Bambu 3D printer users were surprised to hear their machine suddenly jump into action and start printing without any request from them. This happened regardless of the status of the machine, meaning that some began to print with an already full plate, or with the wrong filament loaded.

This wild anomaly was tracked back to their cloud service, which acts as an intermediary between the slicing software and the machines. Apparently, an outage caused the service to mistakenly re-issue a bunch of commands that had been bottled up and waiting for quite some time.

They’ve written a blog post digging into the reason and how they intend to make sure it never happens again in a blog post. As of right now you can manually disable cloud services, which I always recommend. They do have some fixes that will be released that should avoid any possible damage if something like this happens in the future.

And now on to the good news!

Bambu launches a new model repository.

In a blog post this morning, Bambu Labs announced that they are launching their own model repository site, and explained how it will stand out. It seems that they’re taking the same approach that Prusa took when launching printables.com in that they’re offering pre-sliced options, rewards for various actions, and even a way to support artists you like.

Actually, looking at the screenshots, this seems to be a fork of printables, much like their slicer is based on Prusaslicer. I don’t see any mention of this in their blog post, so we’ll just have to wait and see when it launches.