A lot has happened in 5 years; I was working as a maintenance tech for a print farm maintaining Prusa MK3s, that job died of covid, my attention turned elsewhere, I’ve been occasionally 3D printing stuff I need for my shop on my old reprap until I replaced it about a month ago and I’ve had a lot of shit to catch up on.
Yeah I bought a Prusa, and it’s clear they got blindsided by Bambu and they’re still scrambling to catch up. What Prusa used to do well, they still do well, what they used to do badly they now do even worse and what they used to didn’t do they’ve started a token effort at making it look like they do now.
yeah i think prusa really needs to lean much harder into open source… like thats kinda their biggest selling point against bamboo, but there only half-arsing it imo
like an AMS system… why have they not taken one of the open source projects and made it an offical prusa thing, provided financial backing, kits, and developed it?
IMO they could be years ahead of bamboo if they just took all the work the open source community is doing and ran with it, providing a kinda polished, easy version of the DIY side of 3d printing
heck even made their online print farm management system self-hostable and open so people could extend it… that’d absolutely crush bamboo for commercial operations
Prusa was all in on open source for over a decade. All their machines up through the MK3S+ are GPL hardware, firmware and software. What did that get them as a company? A lot of people selling near identical copies of their hardware for lower prices. Prusa’s leaning away from open source hardware because it pretty much meant doing their competitors’ R&D for them. Hell, Bambu Labs relies on code developed at Prusa Research. So their ecosystem is closing up somewhat.
You are right, a big strength of Prusa’s is their mod ecosystem, their community. They are well aware of this, which is why they’ve come out with their OCL license. The Core One isn’t GPL, it’s OCL, source-available. It’s illegal for anyone to start making blatant copies, but the CAD files are there for reference when making mods and accessories.
Prusa’s MMU3 is in several ways superior to Bambu’s AMS: you get 5 spools, not 4. Retract-based tool changes are faster than purge-based ones. Retract-based tool changes are less wasteful than purge-based ones; Prusas don’t poop. And yet, Bambu finished the AMS, Prusa merely got the MMU3 working. Installing an MMU3 requires a fairly invasive modification to the Nextruder and a desk full of tubes and nonsense. I think Prusa’s going to catch up there with the INDX system with the MMU3 as basically a legacy product.
The market for “kinda polished, easy DIY 3d printing” is small and shrinking. I know because I’m in it, and us kit builders are small potatoes to them. Prusa is trying to position themselves in the professional and industrial sector; they’re releasing a “Pro” line of turnkey print farm and industrial solutions, they sell tungsten fill radiation shield filament and certified encrypted USB drives. I believe they are working on a self-hostable version of PrusaConnect, likely aimed at their higher end customers who are more likely to balk at using anyone’s cloud service. To that market, “We’re not Chinese” is Prusa’s biggest selling point.
yeah it’s a very common feature among slicers these days
A lot has happened in 5 years; I was working as a maintenance tech for a print farm maintaining Prusa MK3s, that job died of covid, my attention turned elsewhere, I’ve been occasionally 3D printing stuff I need for my shop on my old reprap until I replaced it about a month ago and I’ve had a lot of shit to catch up on.
i think since bamboo entered the market everything changed and the entire industry kinda went warp speed :p
i’ve had a few printers, but until i got a bamboo i was “excited by the possibilities” more than actually doing things
now im printing loads, and have been since i got the printer a couple of years ago
Yeah I bought a Prusa, and it’s clear they got blindsided by Bambu and they’re still scrambling to catch up. What Prusa used to do well, they still do well, what they used to do badly they now do even worse and what they used to didn’t do they’ve started a token effort at making it look like they do now.
yeah i think prusa really needs to lean much harder into open source… like thats kinda their biggest selling point against bamboo, but there only half-arsing it imo
like an AMS system… why have they not taken one of the open source projects and made it an offical prusa thing, provided financial backing, kits, and developed it?
IMO they could be years ahead of bamboo if they just took all the work the open source community is doing and ran with it, providing a kinda polished, easy version of the DIY side of 3d printing
heck even made their online print farm management system self-hostable and open so people could extend it… that’d absolutely crush bamboo for commercial operations
Prusa was all in on open source for over a decade. All their machines up through the MK3S+ are GPL hardware, firmware and software. What did that get them as a company? A lot of people selling near identical copies of their hardware for lower prices. Prusa’s leaning away from open source hardware because it pretty much meant doing their competitors’ R&D for them. Hell, Bambu Labs relies on code developed at Prusa Research. So their ecosystem is closing up somewhat.
You are right, a big strength of Prusa’s is their mod ecosystem, their community. They are well aware of this, which is why they’ve come out with their OCL license. The Core One isn’t GPL, it’s OCL, source-available. It’s illegal for anyone to start making blatant copies, but the CAD files are there for reference when making mods and accessories.
Prusa’s MMU3 is in several ways superior to Bambu’s AMS: you get 5 spools, not 4. Retract-based tool changes are faster than purge-based ones. Retract-based tool changes are less wasteful than purge-based ones; Prusas don’t poop. And yet, Bambu finished the AMS, Prusa merely got the MMU3 working. Installing an MMU3 requires a fairly invasive modification to the Nextruder and a desk full of tubes and nonsense. I think Prusa’s going to catch up there with the INDX system with the MMU3 as basically a legacy product.
The market for “kinda polished, easy DIY 3d printing” is small and shrinking. I know because I’m in it, and us kit builders are small potatoes to them. Prusa is trying to position themselves in the professional and industrial sector; they’re releasing a “Pro” line of turnkey print farm and industrial solutions, they sell tungsten fill radiation shield filament and certified encrypted USB drives. I believe they are working on a self-hostable version of PrusaConnect, likely aimed at their higher end customers who are more likely to balk at using anyone’s cloud service. To that market, “We’re not Chinese” is Prusa’s biggest selling point.