I respectfully disagree, and say that hand soldering is not a dying art. If you’re working on boards on the regular you probably have a soldering iron and use it often.
Yeah, hand-soldering as the means of mass production of consumer electronics devices has (mostly) died out, but the people who actually build and test things, or the people who fix consumer electronics devices, still usually do a lot of soldering.
It's also a necessary skill in a lot of technical hobbies. Modular synthesis by means of DIY modules, the whole mechanical keyboard thing, electric guitar maintenance...
Maybe adding a lot of metadata? I know AWS block storage adds an additional 4kb metadata file for everything you upload, maybe icloud doing something similar?
I’ve worked at more than one place where you SSH into a Linux host (often just for that datacenter) using certificate-based authentication, only to be printed a JIT (just in time) password for TACACS-based usage in that datacenter, and which is only valid for a few minutes.
Workarounds are many for network devices it seems!
We try to keep the newsletter/blog posts as accessible and digestible as we can, but we have deeper technical detail on the interconnect scheme on GitHub: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionBay
Their strategy seems to be make a profit by taking everything they can from the community while milking their users. Do everything they can to lock people into their cloud and ecosystem.
How are they "taking everything from the community"? You mean researching user feedback on other printers and building a better product?
I have owned a dozen or so printers over the last decade going back to PrintrBot. As with a lot of users, the BambuLabs X1 was hands down the best out the box experience of any printer I own. It continues to be my go to printer while my other Prusa's + Creality's sit idle. As long as the cloud service never becomes a paid subscription I could care less that I am locked into their ecosystem. The additionally functionality that provides is a plus for me not a minus.
The fact they have crammed a bunch of the same features of the X1/P1 into a smaller printer that is sub $500 is pretty amazing.
I heard the same arguments for the Ender printers when they were popular. Best prints ever, incredible detail, etc, etc. At least Ender wasn't actively trying to trap people into their ecosystem.
It won't work though. The clones are coming. Many companies have tried to get the cloud lock-in but it just doesn't make sense to buy in as a user.
I don’t get how they can trap people into their ecosystem. Does it print STL files, or does it have some way of owning the asset life cycle? Whether I sneakernet an sdcard,m, load via octoprint, or something else, I’m not super locked in. Or does locking in mean “making it so user friendly and easy that you wouldn’t want to use a Marlin firmware printer?” Otherwise it’s just another UI for managing my STLs and slicing. That’s a lot different than an iCloud scenario where all of everything is end to end across the closed device ecosystem. Just the last mile of my STL files is nothing.
As an example, Creality giving in and open sourcing the K1 (their clone of Bambu's tech) after initially going as far as violating the license on Klipper to push their own cloud system.
Their strategy is to make a good printer and allow you to easily use it. Also, the "cloud" thing is not paid or anything its just a way to send files to the printer over the internet and watch the built-in camera from your telephone. You can also just put files on an SD card or whatever and print them.
There are one zillion other companies making super hackable 3D printers or whatever if you want that.
