[swsieber]

I'm writing a print farm manager for my wife, who has 8 bambu printers. I've put one of them in lan mode for testing, but I'm pretty close to replicating the important handy (Bambu's cloud app) features, at which point I'll be able to start adding the really nice.

She sells a product with 16 different printed parts, and she prints the parts in bulk batches across 7 different pause points, some of which have pause points for embedding magnets.

The idea is to integrate inventory management and print scheduling into the tool, which will be nice.

I have working so far: * Pulling camera images * Pulling the currently printing file, including the preview image (rendered in bambu studio and bundled with the print; standard for bambu studio), and the pause points * A dashboard with projected timing information * Notifications about jobs starting, stopping & pausing * Remote printer control

Next on the list: * Delayed printing - schedule a print to start in the night. Mostly useful so that if there's a pause point we don't leave a print paused for hours on end. * Print queueing - manually build a list of prints so that after switching plates we can just "next print" for a printer * Print scheduling - select a quantity of print files or groups of files to print, and have it schedule the prints, including projected switch times, to maximize printer utilization by avoiding jobs ending at night * Tracking magnet & filament usage, and integrating BoM and production quantity tracking.

I've been mostly AI coding this, but I've go in to make it extract out components, etc. And I lay down and enforce the DB schema. I've had to ask it to back out a few things entirely. And I've had to give it the Bambu API docs I found github. But it's been going pretty well.

[bilsbie]

This is so cool. Why does 3d printing make sense vs injection molding? Low volume? To many customizations?

[swsieber]

To be honest, we should probably go into injection molding. We do have a pretty long tube in there that might be a bit problematic for injection molding from what I've read (1 degree draft means the tube size inside changes by 1/8 of an inch), and the orientation of the magnets is pretty important, and they can repel each other pretty hard to. So part of it is the unknowns.

The other part is the upfront cost. I bet we'll get to injection molding in the next few months as revenue allows, and we're going to start exploring it this month I think. We'd like to keep things local, though we know we'll still have to contend with knock offs sooner than later.