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Maintenance across fifty printers

The situation

Forty-eight printers of five models. A P1S wants its carbon rods wiped every so often and its rods never oiled; an A1 wants its rails oiled and has no carbon rods; the X2D has steel rods that want both. Nobody remembers when P1S-23 last had its nozzle cleaned, the belts on the old X1Cs are tensioned when a print looks bad, and the one person who does the maintenance is on the shop floor with a rag, not at a desk.

The goal

Every printer shows what is due on it and when, measured in print hours rather than calendar guesswork; the list on each machine matches its mechanics; the person with the rag closes a task from the phone; and the history is there when a warranty claim asks for it.

What is involved

Feature Its part
Maintenance tracker The page: a card per printer, due / due soon / OK, history and per-task settings.
Model-aware task types Nine bundled types filtered by mechanical class — rods, steel rods, rails, universal — plus your own.
Print-hour intervals Every 100 hours counted from the printer's own runtime, with a hand-set offset for a used machine.
Notifications → Maintenance Due and the Telegram bot The nudge, and the Mark done button on it.
The printer card The maintenance pill on the card says due without opening the page.

Step by step

  1. Open the Maintenance page. A card per printer, each already carrying the tasks its model needs: the P1S cards show Clean Carbon Rods and never a lubrication task; the A1s show Lubricate Linear Rails and Clean Linear Rails; the X2D and P2S show the two steel-rod tasks; every card shows the four universal ones — build plate, nozzle, belt tension, PTFE tube. Nothing to assign by hand.

  2. Tell it about the used machines. The three X1Cs came second-hand with three thousand hours on them. On each card, edit the total print time and set the real figure: intervals count from the printer's runtime plus this offset, so a machine that has printed for two years is not treated as new.

  3. Tune an interval for the shop. The A1 minis run PETG-CF all week and need their nozzles more often. On the card's Settings tab, override Clean Nozzle on those printers from 100 to 50 print hours; the farm default stays.

  4. Add what the wiki says and the list does not. Maintenance Types → Add Custom Type: Replace carbon filter, Calendar Days 90, Printer models X1C and P1S only, and the wiki page as its Documentation Link. It appears on exactly those cards.

  5. Filter the floor. The toolbar: Status Overdue — the cards that need a hand today; Location to walk one room at a time; Hide offline to skip the machines that are switched off; sort by Hours to find the hardest-worked.

  6. Close a task from the floor. The person with the rag opens Telegram: the Maintenance due message for A1-12 carries a Mark done button; press it, and the task resets with the chat as the operator of record. At the desk, the card's Reset button does the same, with a note — cold pull, PTFE looked fine — that lands in the history.

  7. Export when the warranty asks. History → Excel, a date range, one printer or all: date, operator, hours at the time, notes.

What BamDude does on its own after that

  • The right tasks per model. The bundled types carry a mechanical class; a printer joins the farm and its card gets the tasks for its class, the moment it is added. A type that does not apply is never offered on that printer.
  • Hours come from the printer. Every print adds to the printer's runtime; a task's hours since is runtime plus your offset minus the hours at its last reset. The bar on the card fills as the interval is consumed.
  • Due soon at 90 %. A task turns due soon inside the last tenth of its interval, overdue past it, and the printer card's maintenance pill picks up the worst task on the machine.
  • The nudge is an event. Maintenance Due fires through whichever providers subscribe to it — Telegram with its button, ntfy or Pushover at their plan-ahead priority — and the daily digest lists it. It is off by default on a new provider; turn it on there.
  • Who and when is recorded. A reset from the page records the user; one from Telegram records the chat. Both land in the history with the hours at that moment.
  • Restore Default Tasks brings back a bundled type you hid, without touching the custom ones.

Pitfalls and what-ifs

  • Calendar days are the fallback, not the default. Print hours is what a farm actually wears out; use calendar days for filters and lubricant that age whether or not the printer runs.
  • The offset is per printer and one-off. It is a correction to what the printer has counted, not a running total; set it once for a used machine and leave it.
  • A type hidden is hidden everywhere. Deleting a bundled type takes it off every card; Restore Default Tasks puts it back for all of them. To silence one task on one printer, disable it on that printer's card instead.
  • Custom types with no model list apply to every printer. All models is the default; narrow it, or the P1S cards grow a rail-oiling task they cannot use.
  • Nothing pauses a printer for maintenance. Overdue is a colour, not a gate: the queue keeps dispatching. Put the printer in maintenance mode on its card when it must sit out — that does take it out of the queue and the auto-queue, and it stays visible.
  • The Telegram button is a reset, not a note. It closes the task with no text; add the note from the page later if the history needs it.