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.

hey, any update on this feature?

@Paweł Płoneczka only that it’s coming, and we’re getting closer and closer to this being the next thing.

Right now what we’re working on is;

• Stability, bugfixes and improving the infrastructure: boring stuff that to the user looks like we’re doing jack ** 😆
• Bambu Lab updates: client fixes and updates, HMS + messages “Notifications” system, AMS humidity, more fans control, light control, etc.
• Skip objects feature #139
• Planning phase of “Staggered print start” #151
• “Assembly” files / “Projects” feature + print thumbnails for print queue and print jobs #210
• Finishing the new Cloud Slicer: multi-material support and open API

But, luckily we have more hands than just mine, so while this is a lot ^, we’re not far off from preventative maintenance. Our developer Johan will be lead on that project, and as the slicer becomes more stable (which is his main priority right now), the Maintenance component will be his next project.

We’ll keep you all posted - this is one of the features I’m personally looking forward to the most myself!

A little update on this.

We had a great Print Farm + SP Developers session in our Discord server today, where we discussed this feature in detail, and a group of print farm owners - who all stand behind this suggestion - talked about their wishes for this feature. Just to recap what was talked about, and what we’ll work into this feature;

• A “Maintenance” page in the left sidebar; overview of all your printers and their maintenance status; here you can schedule maintenance for specific printers, view a maintenance calendar and change automatic maintenance schedule
• Automatic maintenance schedule: define that each printer must be serviced at an interval, either based on time run or just in general time (e.g. every 14 days) - staggered option, so not all printers are scheduled for maintenance at the same time (unless that’s what you want)
• Manual maintenance: mark a printer as “Maintenance pending”
• Printers in “Maintenance” mode won’t be considered for AutoPrint or 1-Click Print, and if you try to print on them you’ll get a warning
• Printers that has pending and an upcoming maintenance slot will show a warning if you try to start a print that collides with the scheduled maintenance slot
• Quick “Mark as in-maintenance” button for all printers
• Maintenance log for each printer; timeline, comment field and Custom Fields support
• Maintenance tasks; some pre-defined, but with the ability to add more yourself: such as “Lubricate rods” and “Change nozzle”
• Potentially helping you keep track of spare-parts too, e.g. if a nozzle is due to be changed, we can tell you if you have enough on stock or need to order new ones

Did I miss anything? Anyone got something to add?

Albert these features you talk about would be amazing!!! I can’t wait for them to come to fruition!! Keep up the awesome work man!!!

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.