Projects, assemblies & products: multi-slice, file versions & more#780

The new “Projects” feature

This is the suggestion for the ongoing development of the new “Projects” feature, which will be one of the biggest updates to SimplyPrint yet.

This update entails:

• A new feature in files, allowing you to create Projects, Products and Assemblies
• A Project, Product and Assembly is a bit like a folder, where each file inside it needs to be printed (X times) to complete the project/product
• Projects and products can be added to the print queue, which may mean that e.g. 10 plates/prints are added to the queue, but represented not just by the individual files, but what the individual files/prints will end up creating
• Projects and products can be built up of other projects, products, single files or assemblies, so you can re-use files and create your entire product catalogue inside SimplyPrint
• This too will bring auto-slicing and file-variants to SimplyPrint: one project, or one file, can be sliced for multiple different printer models, so if it fits on both an A1 and an A1 Mini, well you no longer need to choose which you wanna queue it for; you can either upload files sliced for various printers, or let us do it for you with fully headless auto-slicing (or manual slicing in our cloud slicer too), so once you queue it, it can be printed on various different printers, not just one single model
• File versions: each file will be able to have versions, so you can “replace” or just update the version, keeping old versions on the server, and you choose which version is the primary one that we’d use e.g. when queueing it
• In the Print Queue, Print History and on printers in the control panel, this will bring some UI changes too

This update is a big step that we have to take to get to the #79 Shop update, as this will let you create your product catalogue directly in SimplyPrint, which gives us (at least for the ones of you that don’t have all products be just 1 plate / file in SimplyPrint) the ability to actually map a product and an SKU from your shop, to a product in SimplyPrint. This will bring SKU mapping, product variants and versions, ability to dynamically add a product to the queue to be printed in e.g. Blue and another printed in Red, if your shop supports the user choosing what color to get something in.

We are currently working on this as the next big development project for SimplyPrint - (almost) all hands are on this, we’ve planned it for years, talked with dozens of print farms, gathered feedback and now merged 13 suggestions into this one, as this one project will implement all of them (and more).

Projects v1, as we call this projects, will have a broad scope - as you can see ^ - but it’s not the final form. In the future we wanna bring dynamic products to this too, OpenSCAD and other “CAD-programming” software to e.g. allow for customized or semi-customized products in webshops, e.g. a product with a name, date or any text embedded on it, allowing us to auto-slice this for you too - so stay tuned for that as well!

We need your help with this one; we’re not webshop owners or print farm owners - your feedback and the 13 suggestions merged into this one has helped greatly so far, as well as our many chats with farms about this, but with the scope for Projects v1 (semi-)finalized, we’d love to go over this with you, get your feedback on how you see this working in practice, if we’re missing anything, or if there’s anything we could do a bit differently. So, we’d like to invite to yet another Print Farm Townhall Meeting: SP devs + print farms in our Discord server. Will drop some dates and details in our Discord and in a comment on this suggestion. In this meeting we’ll be showing our progress so far - either semi-MVP or semi-done (depending on how many hurdles there are, and how productive we can be in this European summer heat!), so it won’t all be theoretical!

Thanks again for all your love and support! We love making this platform for you all.

Hello hello everyone! I have merged your suggestion(s), and thereby votes, into this new suggestion that is the Projects Feature. Please check out the description of this suggestion for more info on what this is: it’s a big and important feature, and we really hope you’ll join the discussion and help us shape it to become truly awesome.

In a couple of weeks, either Jul 13th, 14th or 16th, we’ll be hosting a Print Farm Townhall Meeting on Discord where we’ll show our progress so far, and give you the opportunity to be heard and provide feedback before it’s live: we want to knock it out of the park with this one, and the only way to do that is with your help.

Please do join us in Discord (https://simplyprint.io/discord) and vote for your preferred time for when we should host this meeting: https://discord.com/channels/699248047640805463/699264251327414332/1519686234685968516 - to those who didn’t join either of our two last Print Farm Townhalls: it’s an event hosted in Discord every now and then, on a so-called “Stage”: I’ll be presenting some stuff, all users who join will be in the “Audience”, you can chat, ask questions and be invited up to the (virtual) “stage” to talk about the feature. The last two times we’ve done this it has been awesome, and we look forward to doing it again.

Also feel free to start asking quesitons already now and commenting on our plan - it has been laid out in the suggestion description, but we’d love to get the discussion started, questions asked and answered and further ideas added to the pool.

Thanks as always for your help in making SimplyPrint even more awesome: without your ideas and feedback we wouldn’t be here!

Jul 13 at 18:00 CEST (Noon ET / 9 AM PT): https://discord.gg/UWf8fHS3?event=1521129369718882496

Hope to see you there! (do go click “Interested” in our Discord 🙏)