Dearest concerned X1Plus Expander friends,

Wouldn’t you know it — I’ve been getting a lot of e-mail over the past few days! I wonder why? It feels like I just wrote an update yesterday, and I was really hoping for the next update to be something like "plugin modules are out to fab!" or something. (BTW, they are, or at least, production samples are. Hooray!) But it seems like there’s an elephant in the room that I’d better address, so let’s talk about:

What impact does Bambu’s security update have on X1Plus Expander?

The short answer is: there is probably no impact on X1Plus users. Here’s the long answer.

As many of you are undoubtedly aware, on Thursday, Bambu Lab wrote a blog post in which they talk about new security-ish features that they will be putting in X1 Firmware. Then, the next minute, the entire Internet started chasing its tail about this.

Note

I wrote this on Saturday morning, before Bambu wrote their follow-up blog post. Not much has changed from our perspective, and the below is still true.

I am not sure what Bambu’s intent is with this featureset. I am also not sure why Bambu seem to think giving users binaries of Bambu Connect means that stuff won’t be reverse engineered and trivially reimplemented in Orca Slicer like three days later. It seems like an own goal in terms of PR, and I truly cannot understand why they timed this announcement to be less than a week before they all go on vacation for Chinese New Year (it sort of seems like they have very quickly delivered their own punishment). But a lot of things in the world do not make sense to me, and they don’t have to, I suppose.

Anyway, there’s a lot of unknowns about what they plan to do long term, but I sort of want to focus on what we do know, and what they have and have not said. I want to highlight what they say in the section "What happens if I never upgrade to this firmware?":

You may continue using an older firmware version that does not include the new security updates; however, this means the printers may miss out on important security fixes or bug patches included in newer versions. We highly encourage updating to the latest firmware version for the best experience and enhanced security.

As of this writing, Bambu still has their previous blog post live, where they expressed they will continue to allow users to install X1Plus. I don’t think anything has changed about that. Once you have X1Plus installed, your printer is not going to stop working as a result of these changes. Oddly, the implication of this change is that users who want to get newer firmware features as they appear, and still be able to control their printers with Orca Slicer, probably should install X1Plus!

Of course, if you’ve bought Expander, it probably is not a bad idea to install X1Plus on your printer sooner rather than later. We don’t have any indications that Bambu plans to change this policy, but it’s probably better to be safe than sorry. (If they did, it’s not the end of the world, since we have some tricks up our sleeves, but I would rather spend any X1Plus time I have working on X1Plus, rather than productizing exploits.)

Anyway, to recap: the biggest impact of this right now is for Home Assistant and Orca Slicer users who want to run official firmware. (Also, I mean, the biggest biggest impact is that Bambu has taken a huge trustworthiness hit at a time when Prusa and Creality have price-competitive and feature-competitive CoreXY printers, and they are getting almost nothing from it, but that’s a conversation they should have with their board of directors, rather than me to have with you.) From what we know right now, there is probably no impact to X1Plus users from this announcement.

A meditation

Many years ago, I used to be a yoga teacher. I keep thinking about Yoga Sutra 2.16, which I roughly translate as "suffering that has not yet come can (and should) be avoided". There are a lot of bad things that could happen in the future… printerwise, and otherwise in the world. Until they actually happen, probably it’s worth picking and choosing which you’re going to get worked up about :) I can think of things that seem plausibly likely to happen in the next handful of years that I am definitely bracing myself for and getting concerned about. But a lot of what people seem to be talking about with the Bambu printers seems to be speculation, not anything that Bambu have actually expressed plans to do.

Don’t let me dissuade you from telling Bambu you think this is a mistake, and that you’d rather they take a collaborative approach — you should feel free to contact them and tell them what you think! But, at the end of the day, we have a community here that is interested in supporting development on these printers, and you’re part of it. Take a breath, and go print something cool to remind yourself why you own one of these things.

Shameless commerce

I guess there is one more thing that I should say here. The last few days seem to underscore the need for a vibrant third party firmware community for Bambu printers. The best way to support the X1Plus program is to buy an Expander, if you haven’t already! (And if you have already, tell your friends about what we’re doing with X1Plus and Expander.) Crowd Supply has ordered additional stock to go with our first build, and if you order now, yours will ship very close to when orders placed during the crowdfunding period will ship.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, since I have everything out to fab, I’m about to go on a vacation of my own for the first time in like five years — sorry in advance if I’m a little slow on e-mail for the next few weeks. For those of you celebrating Chinese New Year, 新年好!

Talk soon,

joshua