Hi, my name is Jan, or, as I am usually called on the interwebs: halfbyte.

This post is meant to kick off this new adventure of mine (even though I’ve been working on and off on this for a couple of weeks now) properly and give you (the confused reader) an idea on what to expect from Druckzentrale.

What the heck is this?

When I started 3D printing in 2016 or so, one of the first things I stumbled across, of course, is Octoprint. A project lead by the great Gina “Foosel” Häußge, it is a project that allows you to control your 3D printer from a well thought out web interface. It enables a lot of extra fuctionality, for example to remotely control your printer via Telegram, or simply to do time lapse recordings of your prints using a simple webcam. Octoprint has a pretty solid plugin system that has allowed the community to build some pretty cool things. One thing I was looking for from the beginning and found, eventually, in the form of Olli’s “Print History” plugin is to record successful prints in a way so that you can look up things later on - Octoprint only saves the print files and doesn’t really have an idea of past prints.

Now, Print History and the other plugins now all maintained by Olli to manage filaments and filament spools are all great, but I quickly wanted to extend on that. What I would like to have is a central place, one that does not run on the RaspberryPi’s Octoprint is usually running on. One that can work for more than one Printer&Octoprint combination. (I know Olli’s plugins allow for sort-of central storage by connnecting to a remote Database, but that means that I have to run a database somewhere in my local network and I would rather not)

And I think we can go even further than that. What if that central place could also turn into a full blown work log, where you can enrich the print info with more images, maybe post processing steps you did and then what if you could share that work log just like a blog entry in a blogging system. What if you could mash together multiple prints into a “Project” so that people can follow your progress.

These are just some of the ideas that I have for what is currently known as “Druckzentrale”. It’s a weird german name (meaning, directly translated “printing center” or “printing headquarters”), but I’ve been brainstorming names for this and in the past for other products and one of the lessions I think I learned is that names (unless they are super complicated or unpronouncable) matter less than we think and maybe “Druckzentrale” can radiate a bit of that german precision and pedanticness we’re known and loved/hated for (wether or not this is accurate, I’ll leave that to other people).

What to expect

A few simple points upfront:

  1. I plan to turn this into a paid-for product (Software as a Service style) that will likely be paid on a monthly/yearly basis.
  2. I plan to, at the same time, make this available as open source and will keep it simple enough so that people can host their own version.
  3. This is currently a side project with other things definitely being more important, so expect slow and non-linear process.

Regarding point 1 and 2, I don’t plan to run this on a GitLab style model where the paid for version will be more powerful - I simply expect that most people won’t be willing to go through the hassle of running a full blown web application on their own if they can get it relatively cheaply from me. Also, I hope people, if they will actually like what Druckzentrale does, will be willing to pay me for working on Druckzentrale by paying for the subscription.

Currently, I already have a very simple Octoprint plugin up and running on my own printers and a web application already deployed than can communicate with the plugin. It records the printing time, used filament length and saves the gcode file so that we can do analysis on that later.

As soon as I have a somewhat stable plugin and a bit more of what I consider “core functionality” in, I will probably start looking for beta testers who are willing to deploy the plugin and report bugs. I will put up a “Sign up here for beta access” form later on.

What I plan to do (not sure this will work out all the time) is to use this blog to document my full journey, including writing a build log of sorts.

If you have questions about this or ideas or anything really, feel free to write to me at jan@druckzentrale.xyz.