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An urgent print ahead of the queue

The situation

Forty-eight printers, and most of the work reaches them through the auto-queue: jobs are queued as "any P1S" and the router hands each one to the next P1S that frees up. Each printer's own queue therefore holds only the job it is running; everything else waits in the auto-queue panel.

At 11:10 a customer rings: four brackets by 13:00. brackets.gcode.3mf is sliced for the P1S and takes 55 minutes. Every P1S is printing; three of them will finish within twenty minutes.

The goal

The brackets start on the first P1S that frees up — before anything the router would otherwise hand it — without interrupting the prints already running and without re-sorting the rest of the farm.

What is involved

Feature Its part
Per-printer queues A list per printer, walked strictly top to bottom. Move to top, drag, up/down, batches that move as a block.
Auto-queue panel The pile of work not yet given a printer: drag to reorder, Assign now to try immediately.
The print dialog Print starts now on one machine, bypassing every queue; Add to Queue puts a row into one printer's own list.
Staggered start Every start takes a slot; strict mode turns a wait into a refusal.

Three roads

Which road is right depends on what kind of queue the printer has. Two of them apply here; the first is for a farm that does not use the auto-queue at all.

Road 1 — the printer has its own list: reorder it

When a printer's queue is a list you built by hand — no auto-queue in play — the queue is walked in position order and nothing else. So:

  1. Put the brackets into that printer's queue: drag the file onto its queue card, or tick the printer in Schedule Print from the File Manager, quantity 4. The four rows land at the bottom as one batch.
  2. On the queue card, Move to top on the batch — or drag the grip handle when the card is expanded; the up/down arrows are the always-available fallback. A batch moves as a block.
  3. The running print is untouched. The brackets start when it ends — and after Clear Plate & Start Next if that printer asks for plate confirmation.

Road 2 — the auto-queue is the distributor: give the job to one printer directly

This is the farm in the situation. The router hands a printer its next job only when the printer is free, so a printer's own queue is nearly always empty apart from the running job. Anything you put into a specific printer's own queue therefore goes next on that printer, ahead of whatever the router would have handed it.

  1. Pick the P1S that will finish first. On the Printers page or the Queue page, sort by ETA (job) — the running job's own remaining time.
  2. Put the brackets into that printer's queue, not into the auto-queue: drag the file onto its queue card, or open Schedule Print and tick that one printer (not Auto). Quantity 4.
  3. That is all. The four rows are first — and only — in line on that printer.

What happens next is the router's doing, described below: the printer stops receiving auto-queue work until its own queue is empty again, the brackets run back to back, and then the router resumes feeding it.

If a P1S is idle right now, skip the queue altogether: open the print dialog for the file and press Print rather than Add to Queue. That is a direct dispatch — the file uploads and starts, no position anywhere. It still takes a staggered-start slot like every other start.

Road 3 — reorder inside the auto-queue

Use this when the urgent job should stay model-routed — "any P1S, whichever is first" — or is already sitting in the auto-queue.

  1. On the Queue page, the Auto-Queue panel lists pending items in true dispatch order. Drag the item, or its ×4 block, to the top.
  2. The next P1S to free up gets it.
  3. Assign now on the row forces an immediate attempt: if an eligible P1S is free at this moment the item is assigned to it; if none is, nothing changes and the panel says so. It is a try now, not a pin.

With Shortest job first on, position means nothing

Settings → Printing → Queue & Scheduling → Auto-Queue Routing → Shortest job first hands the order to the distributor: shortest predicted print first, with a sticky flag that stops long jobs from starving. The panel hides the drag handles and says so. A 55-minute urgent job cannot be dragged ahead of a pile of 20-minute ones — take Road 2 instead, or switch the setting off for the moment.

What BamDude does on its own after that

  • A printer with something pending in its own queue is busy to the router. The auto-queue's busy set is "a print is running" or "a pending row exists in the printer's queue". That is what makes Road 2 work: your rows are pending, so the router gives that printer nothing more until they are gone — then it resumes as if nothing had happened. It is also why the router never stacks two new jobs on one printer in a tick.
  • A per-printer queue is walked by position. A scheduled time is a gate that makes the scheduler skip a row and move on; it never re-sorts the queue. A row added with Queue only (staged) waits for Start.
  • Every running print claims its printer. A direct Print claims the queue before the upload begins, so the router cannot dispatch over it while the file is still transferring.
  • Every start takes a stagger slot — queued or direct — and waits for one. With Strict mode for direct dispatch on, a direct Print on a full phase is refused with Stagger cap reached instead of waiting; the queued rows just wait.
  • The last print on that printer failed? A row with Only run if the previous print succeeded is held as skipped until you press Unskip — one press clears the whole queue behind it.

Pitfalls and what-ifs

  • Cutting in never means stopping what is running. If the running part really is worthless, stop it from the printer card and answer the plate-clear prompt; only then does the queue move.
  • Order priority is not a queue position. An order's Low / Normal / High / Urgent ranks the forecast and the order picker in the print dialog; it moves nothing in any queue. Moving is done with the roads above.
  • The material has to be loaded. The print dialog maps the brackets' filament to AMS slots on the printer you chose; on the wrong printer the row waits with waiting for filament as its reason. Check the mapping in the dialog at 11:10, not at 12:50.
  • Print takes one plate, Add to Queue takes several. For a multi-plate file the direct print dialog runs one plate; queue several and each becomes its own row.
  • Two operators, one printer. Road 2 rows stay pending and visible; a colleague dragging the printer's queue sees them and can move them. Nothing here is hidden from the queue page.