Bambu Has a Big Week: Rogue 3D Printers and a New Model Repository

This week has been a big news for 3D printer company Bambu Labs. Some of them were pretty bad and some of them could be pretty good. Let's get rid of that bad news first.

Malicious printing due to cloud services

Recently, many Bambu 3D printer users were surprised to hear their machine suddenly spring into action and start printing without any prompting from them. This was happening regardless of the state of the machine, meaning some started printing with a plate that was already full or with the wrong filament loaded.

This wild anomaly has been traced back to their cloud service, which mediates between the slicing software and the machines. Apparently, an outage caused the service to mistakenly reissue a set of commands that had been bottled and had been waiting for some time.

They've written a blog post to explain why and how they plan to make sure it doesn't happen again. From now on, you can manually disable cloud services, which I always recommend. They have a few fixes that will be released that should avoid any possible damage if something like this happens in the future.

And now the good news!

Bambu is launching a new model repository.

In a blog post this morning, Bambu Labs announced the launch of its own model repository site and explained how it would stand out. It looks like they're taking the same approach as Prusa when they launched printables.com, in that they offer pre-cut options, rewards for various actions, and even a way to support artists you like.

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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 it in their blog post, so we'll just have to wait and see when it launches.