[FEATURE REQUEST] NAS Support??

[bolsoncerrado]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. For a Farm environment it would be great to have a centralized FILE STORAGE SOLUTION (NAS DRIVE mapped) to pull files from.

Describe the solution you'd like Click an icon on the UI so I'm taken to a file browser of the files available on the "mapped folder" of the NAS to print from.

Describe alternatives you've considered None.

Additional context Nothing else, would be awesome to have.

[lanewei120]

do you mean map each printer to a folder on your PC?

[bolsoncerrado]

Not a PC, a NAS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage

[bolsoncerrado]

I work with a NAS for all our Prusa MKx printers and sincerelly this is the only thing that stops me from not converting the whole farm to Bambus lol

[bolsoncerrado]

(well, technically a NAS is a dedicated PC with its special OS and all resources put into HD manipulation of data thru the network)

[lanewei120]

bolsoncerrado

so your requirement is to access the printer files from the NAS?

could you give a small picture of your current use case to help us understand better

[bolsoncerrado]

Not FROM the NAS. FROM the PRINTERS.

All Printers point to a single folder in the NAS, shared to all printers.

Think of this like a BIG SD card plugged into a wifi router and all printers download the files from there instead of having to navigate thru the SD card and/or hard drive and PRINT PLATE from there.

Currently if you have xx Bambu printers you have to manually upload every file to every SD, and any modification on the files implies you need to reupload the same file to ALL the printers again. This is very time consuming. With the NAS setup, you just have ONE file you can update and printers will get always the last version to start a print all at once.

So in a farm environment, one could either:

1) go to any printer UI, click on the NAS folder and SEE the files in that shared folder with all the printable files and choose one from, click print et voila

or

2) go to BambuStudio or App and either a) send the print jobs like today or b) navigate the NAS folder inside BStudio, click a thumbnail and "launch" a print by clicking on it.

Of course this opens doors to further features like launch the same print job to xxxx printers at the same time with just 1 click for example (which farms are about ;))

Right now in our Prusa farm we have a raspberry pi with a touch screen on each prusa and since raspberrys run raspbian (sort of linux), each raspberry has a "Local" folder (the octoprint software uploads folder) mapped to the NAS drive. So we can go to any printer, click on the touch screen and launch a print from ALL the files in the NAS with 2 clicks. Or we can start/monitor it from the web (using octoprint) anywhere in the world.

More questions? Just ask.

[lanewei120]

very clear, no more question, thank you~

[walterwongbbl]

@bolsoncerrado So do you want to be able to manage multiple printers for printing in Studio

[bolsoncerrado]

@walterwongbbl Well... in Studio you can "Manage" multiple printers by going to "DEVICE" and switching...

What I want is a SINGLE PLACE where to upload the files and the printers feed from, that's all.

SO say you have a farm of 100 Bambus. Say today you upload a print job to the 100 Bambus, one by one, using either the "send" (and later hitting print/reprint) ON EACH printer or just the PRINT PLATE 100 times.... btu say tomorrow your customer wants a modification on that file. You need to repeat the above on the 100 printers AGAIN! VERY time consuming.

With the NAS, you just upload the altered file ONCE and the printers print from there. JUST ONE update. Not 100.

Hope it makes sense now.

[walterwongbbl]

@bolsoncerrado Thank you, I understand your requirements. Additionally, I have another question: What functionalities do you expect the Bambus farm to have, or which features would excite you the most?

[bolsoncerrado]

Well the most centraized the better, aka ideally, to name a few, sorted by PRIORITY (IMHO):

SOftware to control in ONE view:

• the NAS support mentioned above
• all the printers status (Printing, Error, Paused, Filament Runout,....)
• all the printers stats (nozzle temp, bed temp, z height, type of filament loaded, AMS print yes/no)
• all the printers cameras "videowall"
• the click and print feature (related to NAS)
• EMERGENCY STOP a printer from all printers view
• optional: all printers view of manteinance levels and stats (% usage or cleanage of rods, grease, etc, use hours, etc)

[walterwongbbl]

@bolsoncerrado Thank you very much. Your suggestions are very comprehensive, and we will definitely discuss them.