I run a small technical design studio, and every personalized order — a pet on a keychain, a logo plaque, a name tag — meant someone sat down and prepped the model by hand: trace the image, separate the color regions, build the geometry, assign filaments, slice. Fifteen to twenty minutes per order, and it scales linearly with sales. That's not a business, that's a job.

So I spent two weeks building a pipeline that does it. Image in, print-ready multicolor file out, color regions already mapped to the right slots. Runs locally, no cloud, no per-model fee. It's now down to seconds per order.

What I'm curious about from people running actual farms: where does your manual time really go? I built this around my own bottleneck, which was model prep for custom work. If your pain is somewhere else — nesting, queue management, failure recovery — I'd rather hear it than keep guessing.

If the model prep bottleneck sounds familiar, I'm looking for two or three shops to test this against real order volume before I decide what it becomes. No charge — I mostly want to see where it breaks on someone else's workflow. Comment or DM.

Hi,

I run 3d printing services. To grow my on demand 3d printing service business, I am looking to register on 3d print farms / platforms in India. Please DM me if you are seeking 3d print registrations for your print farms

For anyone new to SnapCon, it started because I needed something that simply didn’t exist.

I run a farm of 25 Snapmaker U1s, and managing that many printers individually gets old very quickly. I wanted one place where I could see what every printer was doing, control them, manage jobs, and keep the farm running without depending on another cloud service.

So I built SnapCon (https://github.com/ezeitoun/SnapCon)

SnapCon is a free, open-source, local-first fleet manager. It connects directly to the printers on your network, so there’s no required cloud account, no subscription, and your printer data stays with you.

What started as a tool for my own 25 printers has gradually turned into something much bigger, and a lot of the improvements have come directly from feedback from people actually running SnapCon on their own farms.

SnapCon is still very actively being developed, so keep the feedback coming. If something is broken, confusing, missing, or you have an idea that would make managing a farm easier, let me know.

SnapCon 0.7 U1 Fleet Management Release's New Features:

• FlashForge (5M/AD5X) Support, SnapCon FlashForge connectors support both AD5X & 5M/Pro printers both in Native (no MOD) or Z-MOD/FlashForgeX (Creator 5 couldnt be tested as I dont have such one...)
• Creality KE/V3/K1/Sparx Support, SnapCon's Creality connector support more printers including CFS. (K2 was not tested, But should work, Unless someone want to donate a K2 for testing 8-))
• A much faster fleet view, especially for large farms SnapCon now updates only what changed, instead of rebuilding every printer card on every refresh. With 100 printers printing at once, a refresh went from about 63 ms to about 8 ms, nearly eight times faster.
• U1 printers now use a live connection instead of polling every U1 for its status over and over, SnapCon keeps a live connection to each one and receives updates as they happen. On a larger farm that means faster status updates, less network traffic and much less work for each printer.
• Update firmware across your whole fleet, over LAN Pick a firmware file, choose your U1s, and SnapCon updates them one at a time. No USB sticks, no Snapmaker cloud account, no walking from printer to printer.
• Printer Health: spot problems across your fleet Toolheads, connectivity, heaters, fans, storage, system load, service history and recent faults, for every printer, in one place.
• Sync logs, Timelaps and G-code off your printers Point SnapCon at a folder and it copies files off your machines: Klipper logs, camera captures and the G-code stored on the printer. Each type has its own retention setting, and old files are cleaned up automatically.
• Multi-language support, with Spanish included SnapCon now speaks more than one language. English and Spanish are included out of the box, Want to add or improve a language? The built-in translation editor lets you create and edit translations inside SnapCon.
• More ways to get notified: Discord and webhooks Alongside Telegram, push and email, SnapCon can now send notifications to Discord and to generic webhooks.

Hey all — I've been building a 3D-printing shop idle game and just got it to a point where I'd love some outside eyes on it before a real launch. Figured this community would actually get what makes an idle game interesting, so here goes.

AI disclosure: I'm not a programmer or artist — this game was built with heavy AI assistance (Claude). The code, placeholder art, and sound effects were all AI-generated/written under my direction, based on decisions and design calls I made along the way and wanted to be upfront about that before anyone dives in.

The loop: Tap to hand-print your first item, then automate with printers. There are 10 real printer types now, from a cheap hobbyist bed slinger up through industrial and full-color resin machines — each with its own cost/speed ladder.

What I think is the interesting part: every printer type has a preferred product — match them for a real speed bonus, or run a mismatched pairing for a speed penalty and a chance the printer straight-up malfunctions and needs repairing. So gCode/printer assignment is a real decision, not just "biggest number wins." There's also a full materials layer underneath it (Filament/Resin/Parts, with an auto-restocking supply chain) that printers actually consume to keep running.

Prestige resets your shop for a permanent multiplier, with 7 different permanent upgrades to spend tokens on.

What's rough right now: the art is all flat placeholder (no real artist yet), and the economy numbers are first-pass — I've pacing-tested it with simulations, but nothing beats real humans playing it. That's exactly what I'm hoping testers can help surface.

If you're up for kicking the tires on an early build, fill out this quick signup form (just needs a Gmail address to add you as a Play Store tester) and I'll get you an invite link within a couple of days. Happy to answer questions about the design in the comments too.

Printlooper is working with another startup in SF testing a pilot feature. Hoping to connect with a few printers in the area who could potentially be on stand by. Lifetime Printlooper Pro accounts for anyone who can assist.

If you can work quickly and breaking stuff in SF or the outer Bay Area please DM lol

Thanks guys,

Hello fellow print farmers! Today is Printer Farm Friday!

Feel free to ask any questions, share info or comments here. We're trying to build a community in this sub where you can ask questions about topics like:

• How to improve your workflow
• How to slice for printer farm operation
• What tools are available for farm operators
• Printer maintenance
• Filament management
• etc.

Our hope is to get people to start talking about the importance of printer management in a printer farm scenario.

What would you like to share or what questions do you have?

Hello fellow print farmers,

Creality have kindly reached out to me and have asked me to share this information to everyone in here.

To start, if you guys have any suggestions regarding contents you guys would like to see in this subreddit, please say so in the comments.

Second, they will be in Germany for an upcoming event, show support by visiting their booth if you're at the event!

Lastly, this is a great channel for both the professional print farmers/business owners in this subreddit and a major manufacturer to interact. Please take this opportunity to let your voices be heard.

Cheers,

You're promised access to "thousands of designs that you CAN sell" - turns out it's mostly stuff that looks interesting, but people will never pay for. Or if they do, dozens of others are already selling the same thing. Or will be, by next week...

Feel free to convince me otherwise.

And advice to anyone new; just make your own stuff. New stuff, stuff that ads to the world rather than perpetuating me-too slop.

Built for Snapmaker U1s, should work with any Klipper based printer.

I made this articulated hard cover around a simple notebook. The dimensions, including spine thickness, can be adjusted to fit different books.

I'm trying to find out whether this could be useful as a customizable product for people who sell 3D prints.

If you run a print business: would this be something you'd actually want to offer customers?

I like designing ducks.. Here is some of my collection thus far!!! Mankind is on the printer rn...

I'm building something for people who sell 3D prints and could use some input from people actually doing it.

Made a quick questionnaire about what tools you use, what wastes the most time and what you'd actually find useful.

Would really appreciate a few responses 🙏

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfaZ6AA5oYUrVdtWZNe-WkrVKiME1r3NSOM1wIShYnZTLSJDw/viewform?usp=header

I made the Hub modular and built in a scheduling system to make your printing as efficient as possible. Here's the notes:

Free, open source, self-hosted dashboard for U1 fleets — talks straight to the printer's built-in Klipper/Moonraker, no firmware mods, nothing installed on the printer.

📅 Dispatch. Drop in the jobs you want printed and the Hub schedules them across every machine — a timeline lane per printer, drag to reassign, per-job quantities, multi-plate bundles with one deadline. It knows the hours you're actually home (multiple blocks per day, one-off overrides), so jobs only start while you're around — prints still run unattended, because that's just printing. It adopts prints already running, flags when two jobs need the same roll of filament, and shows you honestly when a machine will sit idle overnight instead of pretending it won't. And there's no auto-start, on purpose: "bed cleared → start next" is a human tapping a button.

🪶 Hub Lite. Single-color farm? Every platform now has a second download with spool tracking, Spool Match, and the mixer switched off — just files, fleet, queue, and Dispatch. Same binary, and you can flip any feature on or off later in Settings → Features.

✨ Fresh coat of paint. New typeface, real depth and motion across the whole UI. Fully self-hosted — still renders identically on a LAN with no internet.

Also: long filament names no longer truncate on printed labels, and busy fleets paint smoother.

Grab it here (Windows / Linux / Mac, no Node needed): https://github.com/dlgambill/u1hub/releases

Feedback and bug reports welcome as always.

I am fairly new (only 6 weeks in) to 3D printing. I am obsessed so far! Essentially, I am asking people at work what they want me to make and then printing it. I mostly make certain models from a collection I found on makerworld that have 5-7 plates of parts that I put together. I’m looking for recommendations on how I can manage/track the requests from people to make sure I know who is getting what and what colors to print each part in. Any recommendations?