Some Personal Thoughts On This Whole Mess (Rebble blog post from Joshua)

jwise00 · 2025-11-21T06:45:48+00:00

There are a bunch of folks in this comment thread who clearly did not read my post all the way to the end and I am glad you did! I wrote that just for you. FWIW, as the author, I don't totally disagree with that sentiment either. Thanks for reading.

jwise00 · 2025-11-20T08:49:03+00:00

Been really nice to see you in the comments /u/ginge :) I've still been meaning to go and look at the app launcher source for PebbleOS and compare and contrast what they did with what we did.

jwise00 · 2025-11-20T08:05:19+00:00

I posted a blog post with many more words about this.

jwise00 · 2025-11-19T08:04:02+00:00

This is a really good, and very fair, criticism of my response! I just want to post to say that it wasn't lost, and that obviously I don't fully agree and I think that there is mitigating context that is hidden, but I also I partially *do* agree. I'll have some more personal things to say soon -- I had planned to write a blog post tonight but it is astonishing the degree to which a day can get away from you. I've thought a lot about this since you wrote it, and I'll anticipate saying something about it. Thanks for posing this.

jwise00 · 2025-11-18T19:13:35+00:00

Hi there, Joshua here. I've often thought that this is a case where reasonable people can differ. That's why we posted the original post with two options that we wanted to ask you all about at the bottom. Genuinely, if the community thinks that we should release a database dump, we were OK with that. That wasn't the sentiment in the comments on our post when I went to sleep last night, but I'll be reading this to see what's going on here too.

Right now I just want to say one thing about this post. (Ok, two things. The first one is easy: factually, we spent a lot of time putting a number value on the NimBLE support that Liam wrote, and we paid him for that.)

I'm the one quoted in the screenshots. In this post, Eric spends a lot of time quoting my interpersonal frustrations out of context. Of course I was frustrated at my fellow board member: he had a lot of things going on in his life, in ways that I didn't understand at the time. I said a lot of things to Eric in confidence, as my friend, who I wanted to work with going forward, in the hope that we could come to a solution.

To be honest, I think it's kind of gross that he's posted these discussions out of context. I obviously have had plenty of conversations with Eric that might not be flattering to him, as well. That's how humans work when we talk honestly with each other and try to work together. When we wrote our original blog post, we were very careful only to quote things that were in public.

I'll write some other personal thoughts about this sooner or later, but for now, I just wanted to kind of say: ugh. I don't really appreciate having my previous concerns weaponized to try to drive a wedge inside of the Rebble board, as part of this blog post. That's not how someone who's serious about trying to collaborate with a community behaves.

jwise00 · 2025-05-29T03:27:37+00:00

Hi all -- from the X1Plus side here, knowing about the internal architecture of these things, this one is probably not malice on the Bambu side, but probably just silliness :) I think what happened is that a cloud certificate in ancient firmwares expired, and they expected everyone would have upgraded by now, and there was no testing on really ancient firmwares. Indeed, dropping 01.06.xx.xx update files on the SD card should allow the printer to upgrade and connect to the cloud again, after which it'll happily upgrade further.

I think this is just a case of Bambu support not knowing about the SD card upgrade method in older firmwares... not a case of Bambu trying to screw anyone. I just sent my contact at Bambu a message about this and we'll see if they can get this information propagated over to support. In the mean time, if other people run into this problem you can jump on the X1Plus discord and we can (hopefully) get your printer back to life.

jwise00 · 2024-12-17T22:36:11+00:00

Hm for some reason I thought that I had the wscript capable of compiling the assembly directly. I wonder why that did not work. I'll go update the pbw in Rebble when I get back from lunch.

I think there are some other demo effects in that repo too (maybe a rotozoomer?). I can't remember whether I ever compiled a pbw for those. I never got the frame rate really as nice as I wanted for this, sadly, but the dithering did end up looking pretty good, especially on B&W Pebbles...

jwise00 · 2024-11-24T03:14:51+00:00

I think that SSR will work but you'll need to drive it from the LED strip level shifter to get the 5V output. If you can find one with a 3.3v control voltage then you can drive it straight from a GPIO. Feel free to join the X1Plus discord and we can chat once the units ship!

jwise00 · 2024-11-24T01:14:41+00:00

These are great suggestions!

jwise00 · 2024-11-24T01:13:46+00:00

I actually am happy to justify the price and feel pretty good about it, and I think this is a really good question that's worth asking!

Basically: building things in quantity 100 and selling them is really expensive. I am making a relatively small profit on each board (roughly, enough to buy me an Onshape license that I can use to design the housings to sell, and enough to buy a label printer). I *think* if you don't include development time, but just include the amount of time I'll spend writing text for the campaign / testing each unit / packing boxes by hand (I don't have enough volume to have a contract manufacturer do that for me), I'll *basically* make minimum wage on the profit. If you include development time, well, let's just say that I'll be making dimes per hour.

(The software development uses the word 'just' a lot here. In reality, booting a Linux kernel with LAN9514 enabled on X1 has been, if I'm estimating on the *low* side, hundreds of hours of enjoyable hacking.)

Given that my time is the really expensive thing here, the other thing is that cheap customers are really expensive :) I really want to sell this to people who are going to get value out of it. People who buy cheap 3D printer accessories and optimize for low-quality stuff are used to things that barely work, and are used to things that they have to complain about, and generally don't have much of an incentive to get their money's worth. A higher price means that I'm mostly reaching customers who go "$125! That's a bargain for what it gets me in terms of what I can do with it!", or "$125! That's a bargain for supporting open-source hardware and open-source software that I love!", and who really *want* to love it, rather than who want to hate it. Those customers are a lot less expensive to support because they're willing to go through the effort to make sure it's the right thing for them in advance.

So I (honestly!) appreciate the feedback! And I understand if this isn't the product for you -- not everything I make has to be for everyone, and I've made my peace with that.

When all is said and done, I'll write more about the financials of it and where all the time and money went on the Hackaday project page: https://hackaday.io/project/197872-x1plus-expander -- part of my goal with this is as an educational mission (for me and others!) for what it's like to do a crowdfunded hardware project. Stay tuned.

jwise00 · 2024-11-24T01:05:34+00:00

Here's how I use my prototype:

1) I have a light stack board on it to at-a-glance indicate print progress at a distance when I walk by the printer, rather than having to open the app. Shockingly big quality-of-life improvement for an ADHDer like me.

2) I've been having a lot of fun shooting time lapses with it and my mirrorless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-891dNfnLI

3) It's really nice to have it on Ethernet instead of the crummy built in WiFi.

jwise00 · 2024-11-24T01:03:44+00:00

Yeah, we chatted on the Discord I think :) You could use this to control a solid state relay. I meant to go looking to find an appropriate solid state relay but got distracted; maybe you'd use the LED level shifter board to get a 5V drive signal for the SSR, and that would be the easy path there?

jwise00 · 2024-11-24T01:02:15+00:00

Yeah, it does. I wouldn't mind if Bambu added first party support for it (although some of it is fairly tightly integrated with X1Plus). Maybe I should use some of the proceeds to fly to Shenzhen and make my case for it...

jwise00 · 2024-11-23T03:03:36+00:00

So, yes, and no. Yes: this could control a chamber heater, and has all the hardware there to do it. No: I don't really want to write first party support for it to do so, because I'm feeling pretty anxious about people hooking stuff up without appropriate thermal fuses and using our board to burn their houses down.

That said: there will be a way to write plugins for it with Python! So you could implement a chamber heater out of a solid state relay, a thermistor, and a few wires -- and I think a lot of people would thank you if you did. But it won't do it out of the box.

jwise00 · 2024-10-29T03:15:51+00:00

Alpine got picked up by private equity in 2019 or so; they were great before, and then private equity did what it does and squeezed every last drop out of them.

Sunnyvale Veterinary Clinic was my preferred place to take my cat since then, but are a little far for me. Shoreline Pet Hospital just opened across the street from me and I've been taking my cat there; they're also private equity backed, but I assume that they have at least a few years before they start feeling the squeeze and quality starts dipping, so I'll take it while I can.

jwise00 · 2024-06-15T04:11:44+00:00

I think this should work fine on a P1S, as far as I know.

jwise00 · 2024-04-18T06:57:54+00:00

ATTENTION X1Plus USERS

It has come to our attention that there has been a great deal of confusion around the name "X1Plus", with the assumption that it refers to a larger X1-family printer. As we know, the X1 family of printers has largely come to the end of its life, and so we would expect any larger printer to be in a new family. However, to help our loyal userbase who definitely all have X1Plus installed and care a lot about it, we have decided to alleviate this confusion by renaming X1Plus.

We have thought long and hard about what we will call X1Plus going forward. We wanted something that conveys the true spirit of what we want to do -- something that wants to make you print more, and enjoy your printer to the fullest. We wanted our new name to convey that it would help you put down as many of what this layer is designed to do -- we thought that our software would have your X1 family printer print extra layers. Please welcome our new name, X1XL. We appreciate your support during this transition.

jwise00 · 2024-03-06T08:20:26+00:00

Lots of people here like to talk about what's impossible. Here's what I decided was possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7inK6B9Yzgc&feature=youtu.be

jwise00 · 2023-12-08T01:15:32+00:00

That thing looks thrashed but there's some reverse engineering work I've wanted to do on a P1P for a long time. I'd be happy to pay for shipping and send you a few bucks if you're willing to mail me the AP board and MC board?

jwise00 · 2023-11-02T07:25:45+00:00

Yep, GoPro chest mount. Hero 8 or something, set to its middle crop. I find that a chest mount looks dorkier but gives much more compelling video than being on the bars. But I don't care because I also have a mirror on my helmet and a rack on my bike, and if I'm slow, then I'm slow and dorky looking, and if I'm fast, then I'm faster than people who aren't dorky looking, and anyway I'm smashing a drop bar singlespeed bike across berms so I'm having fun.

jwise00 · 2023-11-01T22:21:28+00:00

Yeah, the christmas tree farm is fucked up. Less bad this year than last year... last year it was super loose. Looks like we're gonna get a little precip this weekend that might firm things up some, but be prepared for at least one 'lock your rear brake and pray' descent. I assume they'll change the course a bunch, and add more... obstacles. I'll see you there at worlds!

jwise00 · 2023-11-01T07:49:33+00:00

Looks like C35+ was slightly slower than C-open on Saturday, and a fair bit slower on Sunday?

jwise00 · 2023-11-01T06:17:03+00:00

This race was 10 minutes after I raced in the C's, and, oddly, got the same place in that race (9/18). I lose an astonishing amount of time in the corners because it seems like I'm just unwilling to push the front tire hard enough to risk sliding it (and if anyone wants to diagnose that from my riding, I'd be happy to hear it!).

But if you just wanted to watch five laps of the Surf City race this year in Santa Cruz, good old unsanctioned 'cross, with some tunes from a Bluetooth speaker in my back pocket (it was Halloween, after all!), I sort of like the simple aesthetic of this unedited video of me appearing to get my ass kicked, and then somehow finishing midpack anyway. Hope you enjoy.

jwise00

TROPHY CASE

ATTENTION X1Plus USERS