Turn off Filament Management Setting#449

The whole filament management system, including what is loaded on a printer is a huge pain in the rear. Please create a option in settings to allow us to toggle it off wholesale. Those who want to use it can, and those who don’t can unburden themselves.

Thank you.

Hey John :)

We know that a lot of users don’t want to use the filament manager - but that’s why we don’t force it on anyone, and have the “Static material data” option instead. You can learn more about that here: https://help.simplyprint.io/en/article/all-about-the-tags-feature-mwvsst/[#2](/2)-about-material-tags-static-material-data

Just so we understand what the suggestion is about, and that we’re not misunderstanding each other here; is your “issue” here that the Filament Manager being there is a distraction that you’d simply like gone? Or do you feel you’re somehow being forced to use it?

Everything related to automatic Filament actions, like auto-creation of spools for Bambu Lab can be turned off in the settings, so for all intents and purposes, you should be able to fully ignore the feature and not use it. Naturally I see that if you don’t use it at all, it’d be nice to be able to remove - just wanna get the “real” suggestion into the light here to make sure there are no misunderstandings: as said, we have a lot of customers that don’t use the Filament Manager, but its precense hasn’t seemed to bug anyone else enough to suggest that they can fully remove it from their account.

Hoping for some clarification. Thanks for taking the time to voice your opinion, @John C. Reid !

I am not a print farm. I don’t use RFID Tags or QR Codes or track my filament in any way other than looking at the spool to see what is left. I change filament out to what I need when I need. Everything from a spool being a unique entity, to that entity being attached to a specific printer and the warning if the attached spool doesn’t match the filament in the gcode I am printing is a problem. Yes, I do feel I am being forced to use an inventory system I never asked for, but worst, I can’t even start an impromptu print without it injecting itself.

Even if the static material feature you link to above is the solution to everything I don’t like, it certainly is not obvious at all. I have looked for how to not deal with these headaches and couln’t find it. It should be a simple boolean control in the settings. Use filament management system, on or off. If off, you don’t even know it exists. No longer having to attach a spool of filament to a printer. The only place I deal with filament profiles is now in my slicer.

BTW - the link you provided is a 404, page not found. So I can’t really tell if this would be a soultion or not, but looking at the URL, it is about tagging, and I don’t see how tagging turns of filament management.

John, you can turn it all off in the settings. We have never used the filament system because we likewise didn’t want to track any of it.

Here is a perfect example of what I mean. I have a roll of PETG loaded and want to print something sliced for PETG. I have not created a filament profile for this specific spool, so there is not a way to attach it to the printer. Also the profiles available are truely lacking and there is no simple way to just import a filament that is not in the database to use it. Why is this so hard, I have the filament profiles in my slicer, but due to the reliance on the database I would have to create a json file and contribute to a Github just to add a profile I use personally. So basically, I cannot print at all without hacking my way around it. There are too many warnings (because the attached spool is PLA) and the print button is not even available to me.

This is completely unacceptble for something that calls itself SimplePrint. These types of roadblocks do not make printing simple.

Ok, then go to the Filament settings menu and turn it off. If you don’t like the extra organization just don’t use it?

Hmh, the suggestion board must mess with the link. Let me try again; https://help.simplyprint.io/en/article/all-about-the-tags-feature-mwvsst/

But yeah John C. Reid, as Laramie Huggins says, you can essentially “turn it off”: not completely, and not in the way that you can’t see it in the sidebar or anywhere else at all, but it shouldn’t be hard to avoid using.

You don’t even have to use the tagging way either. As you can see on these screenshots, if you wanna tell us what material is on your printer (which is not even a requirement in itself either), you simply don’t click “Pick new spool”, and rather select a material type and a color. In the printer settings (https://simplyprint.io/panel/settings/printers) you can turn off things like material sync and disable auto-creation of materials.

If you disable this (just for Bambu printers at the moment), all you gotta do is just;

1. Don’t open the “Filament” tab in the left side (we won’t force you in there; don’t worry)
2. When assigning materials, don’t click “Pick new spool”

And that’s really it. I don’t see how we’re forcing anyone to use the Filament Manager here, as the system is designed to accomodate people not using it, as it’s pretty 50/50 whether it’s used or not.

You can further disable all-things-material, so you don’t even have to worry about material tags, which is the “static material info” where it’s not unique spools. You do that here: https://simplyprint.io/panel/settings - just disable “Auto-tag materials”; then new files that you upload won’t get auto-tagged with a material type tag, which would otherwise mean the printer would have to share that tag to match with the file.

We’ll let this suggestion stay of course, and people can upvote it, but as it’s the first time in out 5+ years that we’ve had this request, I don’t know how widespread this opinion is.

Feel free to elaborate on exactly what makes you feel like the Filament Manager is being forced on you - then perhaps what we can do is to take a look at the communication, helpdesk articles and onboarding.

Also, fun bonus fact; the filament manager is by far more popular with the hobbyist community. It’s only a small subset of print farms that go big on filament inventory management! :)

@Albert - so you make my point for me. There is a subset of users that don’t wish to use this feature. Print farms likely always use the same filament on the same printer, so for the most part they are in a special edge case where they don’t have to interact with the feature. Hobiest do change out their filament and thus forced into interactiaing with the feature whether they want to or not, as least as far as the “installed filament” on any given printer.

Again, something with Simply in the name should not add such a hurtle to use. It is called SimplyPrint for goodness sake, so why the heck can I not SIMPLY PRINT?!?!

Forcing unwanted features is never a good idea. This is why I am asking for a simple settings toggle. In the program logic you just need to set a variable as true or false and then branch based on how it is set. In the UI, if is false, then don’t show those elements. If elements are not shown, then bypass any logic that relies on them. This means when I want to print, there is no attached filament, and no warnings that my gcode uses a filament with incompatable attributes to the one attached to the printer. That my friends would make being able to hit that print button so much simpler.

Try it yourself. Print something with a differnt filament type from what you have installed. Maybe the hotend temp is off by 30 degrees C. Pick your printer, and start a print from the printer (not your files) then select the print gcode from your files. You will get a report of the incompatabilities between the installed filament, and the gcode you have selected. There will be a print button, but you will not be able to push it. That is a bad user experiance. At least if you start from files you can override and print anyhow, and that is my current work around.

Why should I have to use that work around though? My point is that I shouldn’t and based on what Albert said, I am not alone. There is a subset of users that don’t use it. Fortunataly for that particular subset they are an edge case that don’t hit that compatiblity report brick wall because they likely always use the same filament on the same printer - that is what you do in high volume production.

I think this software probably isn’t for you my man. If people are telling you how to click 1 button and turn off your inconveniences and instead of fixing it you want to yell from the rooftops about your problems not sure what anyone can do to help.

Show me where that 1 click button to turn it off is. It doesn’t exist. That is exactly what I am asking for. I don’t feel like you actually read the thread.

Besides, I prepaid for a year license on this software. I think that litterally gives me license to make my voice heard.

@Laramie Huggins I notice you failed to actually provide a solution, you just falsely claimed someone gave me one. If it was there, why could you not point it out?

I didn’t see the image. That was my fault. I think I got the notification the post had an update and scrolled down to far.

That option appears to already be checked. However, if there is a filament attached, having it checked doesn’t bypass the compatibility checking. I am guessing that feature must have been added after I started using the software, becuase I was not able to print without attaching a spool to the printer when I initally set it up.

So if unassigning the filament from the printer, and having this option selected means I no longer get the compatibility checks, then this meets all the requirements I was hoping to satisfy with a setting option to toggle off filment management.

@Albert

then perhaps what we can do is to take a look at the communication, helpdesk articles and onboarding.

I think this is a matter or continuing development vs when I started using the software. I have looked for the feature in the past and not found it, and I have searched for solutions and not found them. These things have obvously been addressed since, but I would not know that because it was after I tried to find a solution.

BTW - I used SimplyPrint prior, and left to use OctoEverywhere for a year becuase of the fimalent managenent system. I only came back beause I needed to redo my setup and I though I would give your Raspberry Pi image a shot. So I had a level of bias when it came to this feature already. I was honestly ready to give up again and go back to OctoEverywhere. So just the fact that a solution to this frustration is available retained me.

John C. Reid I’m still not 100% sure I understand the general issue or concern. But I have made this video for you that shows how it’s at least supposed to work: https://www.awesomescreenshot.com/video/43445184?key=748b9d4ec8a368a430e99a8dd8f7e92a

Not meant to shut down your suggestion: we want SimplyPrint to be simple - of course - and if there’s anything we can learn from and improve upon from this suggestion, we’d be super happy to!

But, this is the only time anyone has suggested this - across 45k users over 5 years, and I do not agree with the claim that we “force” anyone to use the Filament Manager. Now if you feel forced to use it, we’d love to explore why that is, as what we intend is that no one should feel forced to use any aspect of SimplyPrint.

If you have a concrete example, like;

• Printer [X] (e.g. Creality Ender-5)
• Assign material
• Slice via our slicer
• [issue happens here]

^ then we have something concrete we can act on. But we need to do it in a productive way: this is our job, we love it, we do it every day, and I think it’s given that we wanna do a good job and make good software. The fact that you don’t think it is good software is alright - and we wanna improve if we can - but telling us that we haven’t earned the “Simply” part of our name, arguing with other users sharing their experiences on the board, does not really bring us anywhere productive. That’s at least not the best way to motivate us to tailor the platform to better accomodate your needs (because that’s what this is; personal preference, given this has 1 upvote and is the only suggestion on that topic).

Feel free to hit me up in our Discord (https://simplyprint.io/discord) if you’d like a productive talk or chat about this - I’d love to see what you mean, maybe with some screenshots, screenshare or a video, as right now, I can’t really see it.