As many of our customers may have already noticed, there is a third-party firmware being developed by the X1 Plus team, which has become a hot topic in the community. Our first awareness of this firmware was through some Youtube videos, which led to my last blog post. Initially, we
Awesome to see that Bambu and the X1 Plus devs are talking.
This is honestly really great news. I watched Teaching Tech's coverage of the X1Plus jailbreak firmware and it looked really comprehensive, the team even took his feature suggestion and had it implemented and ready within a day.
While I do have some reservations about Bambu Labs' proprietary printers in the typically open source 3D printing landscape, I do appreciate that they're not dancing around that issue and instead found a path which allows customers to officially run custom firmware should they so choose.
It's a little unfortunate that the custom firmware waives your warranty though IMO, although it's really nice that they've made the unlock process easy. Fairphone as an example offer a similar way of allowing their bootloaders to be unlocked, where you go to their website and type in some numbers printed under the phone's back cover, and they take you to a page where you are explained the risks of doing so - however unlike Bambu, Fairphone are willing to respect the warranty as long as the phone has been reverted back to the OEM firmware.
All in all though this is great to see and I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with their CFW Bambu machines
I agree. I chose not to go with the P1S because of Bambu's proprietary nature. I don't NEED to SSH into my printer or mess around in the internals, but it's nice to have that option, especially once a manufacturer moves on from an old model. It would be ideal to have community support once that happens. I went with the Qidi X-Plus 3 because of build volume and price too, not just openness, but aside from Bambu's wireless printing for some reason requiring data to go through their cloud I've only heard good things. I think this move to allow third party firmware is very smart and will draw more of the maker market, not just the average consumer.