Preventive Maintenance Schedule#21

Ability to create and maintain a PM list for printers. ie Cleaning, replacing nozzle, bearings, or other components.

Hi there :)

This is actually an already-planned feature! 🙌

What’s planned is that we can monitor your printer usage (by online time, run time etc.), giving you tasks such as “Tighten belt”, as well as manually schedule your own maintenance for a printer, making it so you (or anyone else) can’t start a print on a printer if the print overlaps with a scheduled maintenance (which can be a 1-off schedule, or weekly, monthly, yearly etc.).

We’ve had the mockup and basic idea since 2021 actually, we just haven’t gotten around to it just yet, but it’s making its way up the pipeline, and it won’t be long now :)

If you ad Preventive maintenance is it possible to include a maintenance mode that blocks the printer from acepting a new queue item until unlocked again

Ongoing discussion about this feature; https://discord.com/channels/699248047640805463/1248602887848988754 (join our Discord server if you’re not in it yet; https://simplyprint.io/discord) - join in if you have thoughts to share about the feature, before we start development! :)

Forgot to ping upvoters* ^

I’d like to see the ability to record maintenance event or parts completed, together with an interval between regular preventative mainenance that coutns down. Printers that need maintenance should be flagged and not available to accept new prints unless overridden with a check box or something.

Having the ability to see a timeline of maintenance events carried out such as nozzle swaps, belt tightening, bed replacement etc would enable me to be able to keep a log of work carried out and help to identify other issues.

Great, absolutely a must have! Keep up the good work!
As you mentioned, being able to track print hours on a nozzle would be very useful. Over time, this would allow us to build a normal distribution of “hours until a nozzle sufficiently degrades.” That, in turn, would enable preventative maintenance and more informed troubleshooting.

An addon idea

A custom button with custom gcode to send to the printer. At every defined tool.

Eg i cleaned and lubricated the z rodds i ca press the button and it starts the distribution gvode for the lubricant instead of manualy move the z height

Some way to proactively track upcoming required maintenance would be great also instead of everything being reactive. For example, a tech could come in on Monday morning and pull up all the printers with scheduled maintenance tasks for that week and plan how to tackle it with the least disruption to production.

Update on progress & our thoughts
Thank you all for your patience and feedback on this feature over the past 2 years! It’s been a feature that we’ve been eager to build since before even starting the company.

I wanted to share with you our thoughts and plan for this feature in this initial planning-phase that we’ve just entered, as development has begun.

Overview:
We will be adding “Maintenance Jobs”, a “Maintenance Dashboard”, “Problems”, “Spare parts” and “Tasks”. Let’s dive into what each of these things are, and how they work together;

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1. Maintenance Jobs:
Everything in the new maintenance module will be centered around maintenance jobs. You can have;

• Automatically scheduled maintenance jobs: defined by either;
  • “X amount of maintenances per printer per [year/period]
  • Usage-based: after; X amount of… [print hours / filament usage / nozzle usage (rolls over)]
  • This can be staggered, with settings allowing you to define how many days a week or month you want to be able to have maintenance tasks, as well as max amount of printers scheduled for maintenance
  • Manual maintenance: manually mark a printer as needing, or under maintenance

When a maintenance is scheduled and due, or is manually added, each printer’s maintenance will have an active maintenance job. Like print jobs, they have a full page of their own with a timeline and info about this specific job - just maintenance instead of print job!

Maintenance jobs can be assigned to a certain person, there’s the possibility to add a comment, as well as have it sum up all the cancel reasons, cancel problem types and more from way since the printer’s last maintenance.

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2. Tasks:
Each maintenance job will get a list of tasks that can, should or could be performed during the maintenance. Tasks are created by you, but we will provide some defaults.
Task examples;

• Clean nozzle
• Lubricate rods
• Clean fans

But could also be very specific like;

• Dust off left corner

Tasks can be manually assigned to maintenance jobs, or automatically matched to a maintenance job via a couple of criteria;

• Default: task will always be assigned to all maintenance jobs
• Time/interval-based: this task should be completed at least every [x] [days/months/years]
• Usage-based: after [x] [hours/days/gram/millimeter] usage of [nozzle/extruder/[x] current spare part]
• Problem-based: task is assigned to a maintenance job if problem [x] has been attributted to the printer since its last maintenance

Tasks can be assigned to specific printer brands, models and specific printers, e.g. “Clean AMS” just for Bambu Lab printers.

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3. Spare parts: (optional)
We’re thinking about adding a “Spare parts” feature also, letting you log your, example, nozzle storage, extra beds and various other spare parts; keeping it modular, letting your add your own spare parts, you enter how many you have on stock, and you can then link a spare part to a task. Example usage;

• Task: “Replace nozzle
• When? After 800 hours of print time
• Upon completion of task: mark the printer as having gotten a new nozzle, and start a new usage tracking for this nozzle (and -1 on the spare-parts quantity of the given nozzle)

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4. Problems:
When cancelling a print, or elsehow in the on the printer, you can mark a printer as having one or multiple “Problems”. You can add your own possible problems, or select from some defaults such as “Clogged nozzle” or “Damaged bed”. Upon a printer entering maintenance mode, we’ll sum up the problems and assign tasks accordingly, if any tasks are conditionally based on the printer having one or more of a specific (set) of problem(s).

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5. Dashboard:
Finally we’ll add a “Maintenance dashboard” in the left sidebar; in the future we plan to have multiple dashboards, where the maintenance one will be a part of the overall new “Dashboard” view - but, more on that later!

In the dashboard, you’ll be able to see quick stats and facts about your farm’s maintenance status, upcoming printer maintenance, plan new maintenance (calendar! uhh!), and more.

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General notes:

• We’re trying to keep everything modular so you can adapt whatever fits your workflow: no need to use, for example, “Spare parts” if you don’t care for the added layer/information tracking
• We’re keeping it bulk-friendly so you can mark multiple printers as down for maintenance, as well as complete tasks or mark entire banks of printers as “Finished maintenance” with 1 click
• Tasks are optional

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We’re workshopping a few different designs, but see attached image 1 and 2 for the general idea and direction of the maintenance job view. Image 3 shows how the dashboard could look.

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So - sorry for the novel, but we wanna get this right. Any comments on this? Is it too much? Are we missing something? Would love your takes! It’s now or never(ish) 🙌

Notes; potentially “snooze task” and “Priority task”?

Now, for Partners & OEM we also have some plans - adding to my big blob of text above;

Partner tasks, spare parts and problems:
Managed accounts can inherit tasks, spare parts and problems.

Schedule maintenance for one or multiple managed accounts:
You can schedule maintenance for one or more managed accounts, in case you perform maintenance on their printers - or just define defaults for your managed accounts to inherit.

Grouping by distance:
We’re adding a feature to auto-schedule maintenance based on the address of the location, e.g., so if you have a cluster of customers in the same area that all should get 3 yearly maintenance visits, we can help you group them together by distance based on address.

Report printer problem:
Your customers can (if you enable it) report a printer as “Broken” or “Needing maintenance”, ticking of any and all problems they may have with this printer, which will alert you and allow you to quickly add/schedule a maintenance visit.

@Nick Oertle @Nick Oertle (2 accounts o.o) - any thoughts on this?

Love it! Would like to see Bambu maintenance items and don’t forget AMS units and desiccant.

https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/x1/maintenance/basic-maintenance

https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/ams/maintenance/basic-maintenance