PrintGuard Is a New Open Source 3D Printing Failure Detector That Runs on the Edge

The intricacies of 3D printing can certainly be overwhelming, but the truth is that — at least once you get past the first layer — there are only a few ways in which print jobs tend to fail. Those are usually visually obvious and so they lend themselves well to detection by machine learning models through computer vision. Obico’s The Spaghetti Detective is one popular solution, but Oliver Bravery, a computer science student at Newcastle University, thought he could do better. The result is PrintGuard, which is an open source 3D printing failure detector designed to run on the edge.

Outside of proprietary solutions, The Spaghetti Detective is probably the most popular detection software for 3D printing failures available right now. But while anyone can run an open source The Spaghetti Detective server on their own local hardware, it is pretty resource-intensive. As a result, many people turn to Obico’s paid cloud service.

Bravery’s goal was to provide 3D printing failure detection in a lightweight package that anyone can run on the edge using affordable hardware. With a Raspbery Pi 4 Model B (2GB RAM) single-board computer as a test bed, Bravery found that PrintGuard runs at 40 times the frame rate of The Spaghetti Detective, while also averaging twice the accuracy.

Those are, of course, Bravery’s own test results and may not mirror what users see in the real world, but they are still very promising numbers. Bravery even wrote a research paper (supervised by Dr. Tong Xin of Newcastle University) that backs up those numbers with data, which is something we don’t often see and that adds weight to the claims.

PrintGuard provides a web interface and users can monitor multiple printers through that, receiving web push notifications when print failures occur. It can also integrate with services like OctoPrint to automatically pause prints when it detects failures.

If you want to try PrintGuard for yourself, just “pip install printguard” to get started. You can also install PrintGuard as a Docker image if you prefer. Once installed, a self-hosted setup page will help you configure PrintGuard for your needs, including with external access if you’d like.

PrintGuard is very new and is still in beta, so there are sure to be some kinks to work out. Bravery is looking for feedback from users, so keep him informed if you do give PrintGuard a try.