You can babysit your 3D printer 100% of the time, or you can cross your fingers and hope it all works. Some monitor their printers using webcams, but [Simit] has a more stylish method of keeping tabs on six 3D printers.
The idea is to use a 3D printed hex LED display found online. Adding an ESP32 and Home Assistant allows remote control of the display. The printers use Klipper and can report their status using an API called Moonraker. Each hexagon shows the status of one printer. You can tell if the printer is online, paused, printing, or in other states based on the color and amount of LEDs lit. For example, a hex turns totally green when printing is complete.
Once you have a web API and some network-controlled LEDs, it is relatively straightforward to link it together with Home Automation. Of course, you could do it other ways, too, but if you already have Home Automation running for other reasons, why not?
We have seen other ways to do this, of course. If you need an easy monitor, the eyes have it. If you don’t use Klipper, OctoPrint can pull a similar stunt.
Klipper (moonraker) also supports WLED directly so you can cut out the Home Assistant middleman and just directly control the WLED lights from klipper macros.
To the writer of this feature – You, clearly, have not been 3D printing for any length of time. The reason you need a webcam watching your print is because if the print ‘un-sticks’ from its platform during printing, the next pass of the print head will knock the slightly raised print OVER and then the printer, having no way of knowing this has happened, continues to happily print, but at that point it’s creating a cloud of spaghetti. Having a view of what’s happening through a webcam, and a remotely controllable power connection to the printer allows you to kill the job remotely when this happens, avoiding a spaghetti monster waiting for you when you get home.
Alibaba sells round displays for like a buck, could add one the hexes.
I’m the guy that wrote the original blog post. I’ve been 3d printing for just around 3 years. I have 6 printers, and 5 of them are running about 20 hours a day. So I’m running around 15 to 20 prints a day. I do have cameras on all my printers, but I rarely watch them because I’ve got the beds tuned to the point where I don’t have adhesion issues like you do.
It’s been at least a year since I have had a spaghetti monster.
On top of that, it looks like you may have missed the point of the project. It’s not so I can keep an eye on the prints. It’s so I can keep track of the status of the printers. This project and webcams have completely different use cases, and a monitor on my wall would not look as clean as this does.
What a garbage title (again). This thing is not monitoring anything, but displaying the status of Klipper. Klipper itself does the monitoring.
I agree. I wrote the original blog post and just realized that hackaday put it up here. I did it so I could monitor things my self more conveniently.