3D Print Notifier Is Perfect for Printer Farms

Every 3D printer owner knows the feeling of needing to check the status of ongoing print jobs. In many cases, there is a good reason for that compulsion: you want to make sure there aren't any issues with the print job that you may need to address. But if your printer is well-tuned and reliable, then you probably don't need to check up on it after the first couple of layers. And if you don't break that habit, you're going to find yourself very busy when you have several printers running. To ease the mental burden, Marcel designed the 3D Print Notifier.

The 3D Print Notifier is a very simple device that can monitor multiple printers and tell you when each one has finished its current job. The prototype built by Marcel monitors four different printers, but youcan set it up tomonitor as many as you have on a single network. When any printer completes a job, an indication LED will light up on the 3D Print Notifier device and the device will also send you an email. Assuming you have your email setup on your smartphone, you can receive that notification wherever you are.

This works with any 3D printers that run OctoPrint, which is open source software for monitoring and controlling printers. It is common to run an OctoPrint instance on a Raspberry Pi or other single-board controller that connects to a 3D printer. There are many different plugins available for OctoPrint and all kinds of behavior you can enable, but 3D Print Notifier doesn't need anything special. It just looks for the "print complete" message on the network and goes from there.

To build a 3D Print Notifier, you just need a Wemos D1 Mini or another ESP8266 development board, one LED for each 3D printer, a resistor for each LED, and the 3D-printable enclosure. The enclosure is available as an OpenSCAD file, so you can modify it to match the number of printers you plan to monitor. Enter the local names or IPs of your printers in the code and their API keys, set up your email, and you're done!

The ESP8266 runs its own web server with a PHP script that looks for those "print complete" messages. When it sees one, it turns on the corresponding LED and sends an email.