Curious how people track their filament spools

[m00dawg]

My small print farm is now up to 5 printers (including 2 Vorons) and I recently inventoried all my filament spools and added a small feature to my print farm web app to track my spool inventory a bit better. But that got me thinking - if I slapped a barcode on spools and had a fancy barcode scanner, I could scan spools in and out as I swap them among printers. I think that's probably over-complicating things for what I do given probably 75% of the time I'm using the same filament on each printer. On my V0, it's black ABS. 2 of my Mk3s it's black PLA, 1 Mk3 it's black PETG and my Voron 2.4 it's black or white PLA. But even then, if I empty a spool and scan in a new one, I could have that auto-update my inventory and just make things easier. Still probably not worth the time to integrate all that and buy a fancy barcode labeller and scanner.

I was curious though what other folks who have small to medium sized print farms are doing to track filament spools?

 

[Sanity Agathion]

Hello, I know few people use this: https://github.com/Donkie/Spoolman
There seems to be Moonraker integration in one of the recent pull requests, so it may get more direct support?

 

[m00dawg]

Oh that's interesting! I'll have to check that out!

For now I ended up writing a simple (manual) inventory tracker to my print management app I use internally. It's not very fancy but better than a spreadsheet or text file.

 

[ademuri]

When I used Octoprint, I used one of the spool manager plugins. But then I got a second printer, so that no longer worked. Now, when I get a new spool I weigh it and write the weight on it. Then I can get an idea of how much is left if needed.

 

[m00dawg]

Yeah weighing it is a great idea! My simple manual app has been working fairly well. I need to better group the filaments to flag the ones that I use / care about the most at the top. Adding a weight tracking wouldn't be too big of an add. That could be _really_ useful for the 1kg spools as I have a hard time guestimating those. I'm pretty good with the 3kg ones.

I don't have filament runout setup on either of my Vorons yet so knowing how much is left ends up being important (I really need to get around to added the BTT runout sensor to my 2.4...)

 

[lord-carlos]

I think Spoolman can read an QR code through the camera connected to the klipper printer. Pretty neat.

 

[m00dawg]

QR code would be pretty amazing indeed! That would certainly be the endgame there.