A long time coming

The fight against community mods in prusa printers has finally come from Prusa.

I’ve known about this coming feature for some time and it’s one of my reasons for distancing myself from Prusa as I feel the community has done so much to improve their products. The mini wouldn’t have the cooler motors, geared extruder, the discovery of the over heating stock firmware from Prusa for the MK3, and so on wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the community.

Why is Prusa doing this? Two parts. Support abuse and lawsuits. People who heavily modify their printers asking for support has turned them off from innovating on their platform. Mind you these innovations tend to fix inherent issues but it still makes sense that replacing parts after you’ve heavily modified and are working outside the stated use. The lawsuits makes the most sense. Prusa has been plagued with any brand that uses the term Prusa in their printer starting fires so they want to lock any chance down for more frivolous lawsuits from bogging down their company. The mini has internet connectivity and a community firmware can be exploited to harm your printer. It’s a good idea to circumvent this by securing the firmware and making sure if their is a security issue that it’s from Prusa and not everyone changing things or manipulating the source code.

The myth. Prusa has stated that some community firmwares circumvented basic safety features in marlin. You sure can but none of the main people sharing firmwares have disabled it so it’s not a mainstream issue and the idea that Prusa is trying to use this as a reasoning is disheartening. In the end Prusa wants the image of their brand to be one that the printer is fool proof out of the box and doesn’t need mods. I’d be happier if they’d admit that vs lying to the community about it.

What are my thoughts? Kudos to Prusa for protecting their ecosystem. It is a smart move to make sure frivolous lawsuits aren’t the norm and also to protect its user base from malicious firmware. In the end this is sad to responsible modders who only made Prusa printers better and going forward every Prusa will be locked down like this.

I definitely don’t recommend anyone circumventing the protection even though I know it’ll happen but for the Mini it’s best to leave stock anyway even though it would be fun to play with. I mean we can always pull the tab and place any firmware we want and play with it just can’t get any electronics replaced with warranty if we do so.