3-D Print General - Feeding Printers Filament

[Molokroid]

There are three routes of enforcement in China. The PSB (police), the MSS (Spooks), and the Army. The army doesn't play with the likes of us because they just copy everyone shit and use it for free themselves.

Interesting. China really is an opaque wild west when you do not understand how the country works. The patent system seems more about creating patents first in China and then after an embargo releasing it to the rest of the world. What I was more curious about was how European or US companies develop products in the west first, get them manufactured there and then get completely ripped by producers selling a few extra after hours or local competitors making blatant copies at 90% of the quality and half the price.

Tbh i always though bambu was like the printer for people who dont want to know how a printer works.

It occupies both ends of the bell curve. One one side you have complete noobs that stay entirely within the BL ecosystem and print premade models/tinkerCAD projects. BL is perfect for this market segment as fiddling with Ender 3 leveling feet with a piece of paper is a nightmare. They are content and do not care about freetard screeching and GPL Codes of Conduct. They still should RTFM and actually understand what different materials, slicer settings and maintenance requirements are but you can only help so much.
On the other end, you have users that fully utilize the capability of the printers as a tool to make actual engineering components and prototype parts in traditionally difficult filaments while tweaking the fuck out of their slicer settings with Orca in LAN mode. The AMS is great for just loading a bunch of frequently used filaments (even brittle CF ones) and then just lazily starting a job from your desk and watching it from the camera. The LIDAR Pressure Advance tuning was recently unlocked in Orca and is fucking brilliant, as beforehand you had to rely on the internal printer filament library or print out a bunch of swatches and eyeball "hm which one looks less shit and save it to an orca profile. The nozzle probing works flawlessly and the auto purge is pretty decent (I am shocked Prusa printers do not have a nozzle wiper, it seems pretty fucking basic).
Fundamentally do you want a tool or a project. Bambu is a tool you can turn into a project if you want, but most people do not. I just wish they were less of a ratfuck company but all I can do is not make the same mistake next time.



My next printer is absolutely going to be a Voron or a kit build with an INDX or box turtle AMS, but until then I will keep using my current work horse with Orca, un-updated and on LAN mode. Fuck ecosystem lock in. Also I need better chamber filtration or venting, most off the shelf printers leak like a sieve and I am not at the stage where I am going to take a holesaw to my printer.

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

Interesting. China really is an opaque wild west when you do not understand how the country works. The patent system seems more about creating patents first in China and then after an embargo releasing it to the rest of the world.

The national security screening has a US equivalent, but it's not used as much because the state is not as entwined in everything, and (relatively) powerless to the Chinese one.

Ostensibly, the intra-party evaluation system is more competitive than US elections. Every party cadre member, from the village level to the Politburo, have statistical goals to hit. Every position, every role, every assignment you are ever given will be evaluated with a statistical, mathematical, rubric matrix scoring methodology against every other party member in China around your rank. Things like patents filed, average income, employment rate, education rate, nobel prizes, etc.
If you cannot hit a quantifiable, objective metric, you will fail out because the party grounds itself in science and methodology.
Of course, this leads to a bunch of gaming the system, which is why China leads the world in bullshit patents, bullshit academical papers, and bullshit metric hitting. If you want some more cultural context, read The Scholars 《儒林外史》, it is a deeply ingrained, modernized facet of the Confucian system not easily understandable to a westerner.

tl;dr Just imagine the most retarded, bullshit paper about kiwifarms as a hate site, mutiple by 1000x, and extended into any quantifiable metrics.

What I was more curious about was how European or US companies develop products in the west first, get them manufactured there and then get completely ripped by producers selling a few extra after hours or local competitors making blatant copies at 90% of the quality and half the price.

You are a non-Chinese company. Let's say you make a great big breakthrough like a consumer quantum computer. This is the lifecycle of an industry in China:

The Chinese government designates this as a "approved breakthrough to emulate" or "strategic reform target" by the Politburo, filtered down via the State Council, offically stamped National Reform and Development Council. Suddenly, laws are relaxed (or blind eye turned), money comes in, non monetary subsidies become a thing. It becomes a graded metric in the cadre evaluation (usually highly weighted too).

1) You will be approached by Chinese businessmen with connections to either a major private company or the party to work as a joint venture (51% stake by the domestic partner ofc, usually a state owned portion as well).
1a) You agree, you become the flagship model and first preference vendor of the government, of people. Every other foreign company gets told to fuck off.
1b) You agree, you get scammed, get free gulag if you fight it in the court. Not Indian tier Union Carbride with Bophal though.

2) You refuse.
2a)Businessmen with connections will smuggle your devices, first to the military/MSS or friends in a close industry. It gets copied, government subsidies come in if its something China cannot build
2b) Students who can work as H1Bs (or equivalent) work on it, they note down the drawings, they copy it to their friends,
2c) Students/employees who work there get a better "package" like from the talent program if they want to be a large fish in a small pond. Government subsidies (free housing, free medicare, free education, better access to services), prestige (CAS, teaching/lecture roles), major politician backing. Local cadre will stay the fuck out of your way usually (NE is an exception), provincial/federal level will actively try to support your project to one up other provinces/state "to be the first"

3) Bunch of fake goal hitting companies come in, lots of money embezzled, big scandals break out. Government puts the break on it and says "fuck you no more" the administrative oversight becomes restrictive, you are now forced to have additional oversight by the government, special working groups made with tangentially related specialists. Every program is now scrutinized, no approval? You get shut down even if you are running.

4)After the Chinese companies become competitive:
Your company gets outpriced, and forced into cutting costs, left only in a corner where Chinese companies can't reach (gov contracts, TAA compliance, etc). If foreign, goverment suddenly marks you as "national security liability", you get harrassed to spin off the Chinese company to the government.
5) It's now a "old" industry in China. Something more interesting comes along, or there's no more growth. Chinese gov cuts subsidies, the NRC drops it as a "high tech industry". Now labeled an "industry of high pollution or obsolescence." If you didn't get out, you get retroactively slapped with a "polluting industry tax", suddenly the tax inspections are much more stringent and retroactive (it's up to 15+ years in the MIC right now lmao), everyone still in the industry goes to jail, only some with very powerful party backers remain. One or two enshittified companies now control 90% of the world market.

 

[Spaced Outside Cargo]

haha

look man it was a different time bambu didn't even exist yet and the bar for "well enough" was a lot lower back then

One one side you have complete noobs that stay entirely within the BL ecosystem and print premade models/tinkerCAD projects. BL is perfect for this market segment as fiddling with Ender 3 leveling feet with a piece of paper is a nightmare. They are content and do not care about freetard screeching and GPL Codes of Conduct. They still should RTFM and actually understand what different materials, slicer settings and maintenance requirements are but you can only help so much.

You could shorten this to "those people that try to sell articulating dragon models at expos and cons".
It feels like there's an ethical concern in marketing to these people knowing fully that inevitably these retards are going to start giving their family members PLA coffee mugs because they were never pushed to learn a single thing besides how to download files from a website.

 

[Molokroid]

Wild. I had no idea the Chinese system was so formalized.
Better hope the democratic governments quit screeching and flinging shit at eachother or they will get rolled up by the East.

Was going back through my Downloads folder and I found this: "Improvised MANPADS Prototype - Launcher and Rocket Assembly [DDO2EvXyncE]".
The entire channel that made it was wiped so I thought I would dump the video here before it is lost to the sands of time. An interesting first stage of a project to build a DIY (3D Printed) MANPAD missile and launcher that can track targets using a distributed array of sensors. Forget dusty outdated paper copies of the anarchist cookbook, the future is now old man.