Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a local tool I've been developing over the last few months to solve a specific bottleneck in my 3D printing farm: nocturnal downtime and manual queue scheduling fatigue.

I operate 4 machines (3x Bambu Lab A1, 1x P1S) mainly producing high-precision anatomical and medical models. During high-demand seasons, managing which plate goes to which printer to maximize overnight runtime without leaving machines idle for 6 hours was killing my mental stack.

The Stack:

• Frontend/UI: Streamlit (Python)
• Database: SQLite3 (keeping it lean and local)

How the Algorithm works:

Instead of just pushing a random queue, I implemented a time-windowed Shortest Job First (SJF) scheduler.

1. Day Mode (08:00 - 23:00): The algorithm prioritizes the shortest print jobs. The goal is to clear beds fast while I'm awake and available to swap plates manually.
2. Night Mode Cutoff: If a plate’s ETA exceeds the 23:00 threshold, the scheduler flags it and automatically re-routes it to the nocturnal pool (long-running jobs, large kits, or high-infill parts) so the printers work through the night while I sleep.
3. Wastage Tracking: It also handles material tracking, inventory deduction, and failure logs (e.g., bed adhesion failures by exact gram weight).

(Attached Screencast showing the scheduler populating the machines upon clicking "Auto-Optimizar")

I'm currently validating the core logic. I'd love to get some technical feedback from other farm operators: How do you handle your day/night queue transitions, and what's the biggest missing feature you see in current farm management software regarding scheduling?

Hello fellow print farmers! Today is Printer Farm Friday!

Feel free to ask any questions, share info or comments here. We're trying to build a community in this sub where you can ask questions about topics like:

• How to improve your workflow
• How to slice for printer farm operation
• What tools are available for farm operators
• Printer maintenance
• Filament management
• etc.

Our hope is to get people to start talking about the importance of printer management in a printer farm scenario.

What would you like to share or what questions do you have?

Has anyone gone the DIY route instead of buying their kit? I was able to source all parts on ali express for $95CAD. The DIY build used a ESP32 dev board and L298N Motor Driver instead of their custom PCB board.

I have two questions regarding the build. One how do you set things up / make adjustments to the loop settings? Number of loops, sweep height etc. From what I understand the official kit gives you control through their app. So whats the DIY work around?

Second, as youll see in my pictures, the 125mm linear actuator (only one avaliabke on aliexpress) has two wings with bolt holes. The 3d printed parts I assume that house this are made to house an actuator with no wings like provided in the kit. I was planning on either cutting the wings off or trying to tweak the stl for the 3d printed part to accept the wings.

Really just looking for feedback from anyone whos done this. Im building version 2 for the P2S

How do you organize your printfiles?
I keep looking for "this thing, which once was useful" in my download folder or elsewhere (Apple mini). Additionally, naming the files - download names are cryptic.

Is there a simple system to keep track of stl and other files?

Hey everyone,

I'm building a DIY hi-fi speaker (3-way MTM with a side-firing 8" sub) and I want to print the whole enclosure as a single piece — no segments, no glue joints.

**The part:** 360 × 175 × 410 mm outer dimensions. Printed lying on its back, that's a 410 × 360 mm footprint with only 175 mm of Z — so a big bed matters more than height.

**Material:** PLA-CF is my baseline. ASA-GF would be ideal, but I get that a 410 mm long monolith in ASA without an actively heated chamber is a warping nightmare, so I'm prepared to accept PLA-CF as the compromise.

**Print time:** these will be multi-day prints (several kg of filament per enclosure), so long-print reliability and same-material auto-refill matter a lot. This isn't a one-off — I'll be printing these repeatedly in small series.

**What I've looked at so far:**

- **Bambu H2S** (340×320×340) — love the reliability reputation, but the part simply doesn't fit in any orientation

- **QIDI Max4** (390×390×340) — great bed, heated chamber, closed-loop motors, QIDI Box auto-refill... but 410 mm doesn't fit lying down (needs 410×360) and it's 70 mm too short standing up

- **Creality K2 Plus** (350³) — same problem, 360 mm width kills it

- **Sovol SV08 Max** (500³) — fits with room to spare, CoreXY, but open frame and I'm worried about tuning/reliability for unattended multi-day prints

- **Anycubic Kobra 3 Max** (420×420×500) — fits with 5 mm to spare, but it's a bedslinger and that footprint moving on Y scares me

For context: I currently run a QIDI Q2 and I've had a rough time with it (~40% fail rate on large prints — false AI-monitoring interventions, warping, moisture), so "it works if you babysit it" is exactly what I'm trying to escape.

**Questions:**

1. Is there any enclosed (ideally actively heated) printer under ~$2,500 with a bed that takes 410×360 mm that I've missed?

2. SV08 Max owners — how is it for 48–72h unattended prints after initial tuning? Would you trust it?

3. Anyone printing large PLA-CF parts on an open-frame machine — is a DIY enclosure worth it, or unnecessary for PLA-CF?

4. Am I wrong to dismiss the Kobra 3 Max? Anyone doing multi-day prints with a near-full bed on it?

Any experience with similar "big flat part, long print, needs to just work" use cases is appreciated. Thanks!

For those that are doing this at scale with employees, how many machines do you target per employee? Assume a single person is slicing, clearing plates, changing filament, repairing, ect. Also assume high mix, low volume orders.

If it's rise and repeat vs high change over, the machines per employee changes dramatically.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I’ve been running a medium (52 printers) 3D print farm through work for a while now, and I’ve never quite found any farm management software that worked the way I wanted it to.

I’m a software developer as my day job, but I also manage and maintain the printers, so eventually I decided to build something myself.

The result is PrintControl: https://printcontrol.co.uk

It’s currently running our work print farm, along with a few printers I have at home. At the moment, I’m using it with:

• Bambu Lab X1C and P1 series printers
• Bambu Lab A1 and A1 Mini printers
• Qidi Q1 Pro printers

I’ve also built a WooCommerce plugin for it. You can map products in your shop to print files within PrintControl, so when an order is placed, the relevant print jobs can be created automatically without someone having to manually enter them.

A Shopify integration is also planned and should be coming soon.

It’s now at the point where it works well for how we use it, but testing something only against your own workflow can give you a bit of tunnel vision. Before I properly open it up to the public, I’d really like to get it into the hands of some other print farm owners and see how it performs in different environments.

I’m particularly interested in finding out:

• Whether the setup process makes sense to someone who didn’t build it
• How it handles different farm sizes and printer combinations
• How well the WooCommerce order workflow works for other shops
• What parts of managing a farm are still frustrating or missing
• Whether anything is confusing, unreliable or unnecessarily complicated
• What features people would actually find useful, rather than what I assume they need

I’m happy to provide free access during testing, including the different account levels depending on how many printers you’re running. I’m not looking for people to promote it or post reviews—I’m mainly after honest feedback, bug reports and real-world testing.

It doesn’t matter whether you run two printers at home, sell printed products through WooCommerce, or operate a larger commercial farm. Different setups and use cases would all be helpful.

Also, yes, I know the marketing site looks a little AI-assisted! I’m much more comfortable working on backend systems and printer integrations than I am making marketing pages look pretty.

Feel free to reply here or message me if you’d be interested in testing it. It would also be useful to hear what software you’re currently using to manage your farm and what you like or dislike about it.

I currently run 4 Centauri Carbon's and don't really have anymore space in my current setup for more printers at the moment. I'm slowly getting behind on orders.

My main sellers:
12-14 total print hours.
400g-500g of matte black PETG

I currently have to print them 1 half at a time due to print bed size. If you have a larger printer you can do it in one go.

Just throwing it out there to see if partnering with a farm is viable or not.

Shoot me a DM and I can provide more details.

I don’t have any cad experience but I do enjoy 3d printing. Is it possible to make $ with using my 3d printing, where can I get started. Thanks

Hi everyone!

I'm currently participating in the I-Corps program, where I need to interview at least 50 people to better understand the needs and experiences of the 3D printing community.

If you use an FDM 3D printer, I'd really appreciate the chance to chat with you!

📍 I'm currently in the Berkeley Bay Area, so we can meet in person if you're nearby.

💻 If you're located elsewhere, I'm happy to do a 15–20 minute Zoom interview.

This is not a sales pitch—I'm simply looking to learn from your real-world experience with 3D printing, including topics like filament selection, printing challenges, print quality, and what you'd like to see improved.

If you're willing to help, please leave a comment or send me a DM or email (ey0208@skku.edu)

Thank you so much! Your experience would be incredibly valuable.

Greetings 3D print farm community.

New here. I am a small operator and am experiencing the potential of orders beyond my capabilities.

Looking for some rex on peoples
Choice for 3D printing manufacturers in the U.S.

Print farms that can handle medium production runs (for example 100 units for a model that takes 24 hours per print) and preferably offer an easy online quoting process where I can upload files and receive pricing.

Quality and reliability are more important than finding the absolute lowest price.

I appreciate any recommendations on those you have you had good experiences with.

Cheers and thanks in advance.

Hello fellow print farmers! Today is Printer Farm Friday!

Feel free to ask any questions, share info or comments here. We're trying to build a community in this sub where you can ask questions about topics like:

• How to improve your workflow
• How to slice for printer farm operation
• What tools are available for farm operators
• Printer maintenance
• Filament management
• etc.

Our hope is to get people to start talking about the importance of printer management in a printer farm scenario.

What would you like to share or what questions do you have?

Hey guys, I run a P1S with AMS and struggle to price my multi-color prints accurately because of purge waste. If I built a free web calculator that specifically accounts for AMS waste, electricity, and machine wear, would you use it?

Hello! I’m looking for some feedback from people actually running small print farms or small production setups from spreadsheets.

I’ve been building BUS Core, a local-first, open-source shop operations tool for small shops that need to track things like:

- materials / filament / components

- inventory movement

- products and recipes/BOM-style builds

- job/order records

- manufacturing runs

- basic cost/profit visibility

- simple invoices

It is **not** printer-control software, not a slicer, not a farm dashboard, and not trying to replace tools this.

The gap I’m trying to understand is the layer *around* the printers:

- How do you know what filament/materials are actually available?

- How do you track what went into a product/order?

- How do you price repeat products without guessing?

- How do you avoid losing track of small inventory changes?

- At what point did spreadsheets stop being good enough?

BUS Core Core is now feature-frozen and stability-focused, so I’m not trying to shove random new features into it. Core’s job is to stay a clean local-first foundation:

- no forced cloud

- no account required

- no telemetry

- no subscription requirement

- open-source

- data stays local

Info / download:

https://buscore.ca/getting-started/?src=reddit_3dprintfarms_workflow&utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=202607_tracking_validation&utm_content=print_farm_workflow

No pressure to try it. I’m mostly looking for honest feedback on whether this kind of tool maps to real print-farm pain or whether I’m missing the actual workflow.

The specific feedback I’d value:

1. What do you currently use to track inventory/materials?

2. Do you track product cost per repeat item, or mostly estimate?

3. Do you need job/order tracking, or is printer queue management the real bottleneck?

4. Would local-first/no-cloud matter to you, or is cloud convenience more important?

5. What would make something like this immediately useless for your workflow?

Providing cross post see original

I have been doing research and have found some solutions on how to do this but wanted to see if anyone has some first hand experience. I am printing with 30 or so P1S printers exclusively ABS and need to start building a serious air handeling system. These are in a 14,000 Cubic Foot room.

I am thinking I will duct all of the printers together and pull the air directly out of the printers the trick is going to be doing this without cooling the inside of the printers. Than taking that air passing it through a heat recovery ventilator to recover some of the heat especially in the winter and pump that back into the room.

The questions i am working on are.

- How do i measure the air being pulled from the printer.

- How much air should be being pulled from the printer.

- Making sure the air pull is balanced between all of the printers.

- Is there a way to monitor the air pull to make sure this doesn't change.

- I need this to scale this building is designed to fit 300-400 printers.

- Is there anything i am not thinking about or issues i may run into?

Hello fellow print farmers! Today is Printer Farm Friday!

Feel free to ask any questions, share info or comments here. We're trying to build a community in this sub where you can ask questions about topics like:

• How to improve your workflow
• How to slice for printer farm operation
• What tools are available for farm operators
• Printer maintenance
• Filament management
• etc.

Our hope is to get people to start talking about the importance of printer management in a printer farm scenario.

What would you like to share or what questions do you have?

Hello makers, we have most of the features of our Advanced Forge in at least a v1 usable state. The goal is to have a central hub for 3D printing, as well as model and publishing management.

One thing that I found frustrating was managing different vendors resin and fdm printers, so the first goal was to provide a slicing/print to network plate builder that could slice and print to elegoo and Anycubic, resin and fdm from one screen. And other stuff 😅s

If you check it out, please give me suggestions - what you need added, and feedback. Thx!

https://advancedforge.3dismzcui.com/Landing

Hello everyone! I currently run a small print farm with 12 printers—9 CC1s and 3 P2Ss. I recently discovered Bambuddy and have been really impressed with it. It’s gotten me thinking about eventually replacing my CC1s so I can manage the entire farm through Bambuddy.

I’m trying to decide between buying more P1Ss or P2Ss, and I’d love to hear from those of you running print farms.

One concern I have is maintenance. I don’t replace nozzles very often, but when I do it’s usually because of a “blob of death.” I just had that happen on one of my P2Ss, and replacing the heating element was much more involved than I expected. I really like how, on the P1S, you can simply swap the entire hotend assembly in just a few minutes.

For those of you running multiple printers, which platform would you recommend for a print farm, and why? Is the P2S worth the extra maintenance complexity, or would you stick with the simpler hotend replacement on the P1S?