Hello hello SimplyPrint'ers!
It's been a while since our last blog post - but worry not, we've been hard at work behind the scenes on a bunch of cool stuff - and some of that cool stuff, we're here to share with you now!
What we'll talk about in this blog post
Let's start out this first blog post of 2024, with an update on the Bambu Lab integration!
Bambu Lab integration update
It's no secret that the development of our, by now quite highly-anticipated Bambu Lab integration, has been in development for much longer than we had expected, and we have not been great at properly communicating the progress and current state of the integration to everyone who's on the beta waitlist - so, first and foremost; sorry to everyone who's been waiting - some as long as since August 2023, when we first opened up the beta waitlist signups.
When is it ready, and how does the beta invite system work?
I hate to be that guy, but... Soon... Depending on which beta round you are in. Let me elaborate...
How the beta invites work
Right now, about ~15 users have their hands on the pre-beta version of our beta integration. Some print farms, some hobbyists, some schools - but covering all the different Bambu Lab printers.
When we're confident that we're ready for the first real beta version, we'll start properly inviting those in Beta Round 1 out of 3.
- Round 1 invitations: we expect to send out these invites within 1–2 weeks from today (Mar. 3)
- Consists of the first 42 people to sign up for the beta.
- Round 2 invitations: depending on how many bugs and issues our round 1 testers find, we hope to keep the rounds short, and start sending out round 2 invites 1–3 weeks after round 1 invitations
- Consists of the next 58 people who signed up for the beta
- Round 3 / open beta: after a short second testing round, we'll notify everyone who signed up for the beta, but who didn't make it in round 1 or 2, that the beta is now open to everyone. This means we'll be out of closed beta - no more waitlisting
- Full release: TBD; depending on the feedback we get in the first 3 rounds, we hope to be confident enough to remove the "Beta" tag from the integration, within a month or so. But, the beta integration will be deemed production-ready
You'll be invited to the beta via email if you signed up for the waitlist.
Get ready for the Bambu Lab integration: hardware requirements
TLDR;
- You need a computer or Raspberry Pi to run our Bambu Lab Client software. Raspberry Pi 4B, 2+GB RAM recommended
- This device needs to be turned on at all times
- This device must be on the same network as your Bambu Lab printer(s)
- The client can connect to multiple Bambu Lab printers
- Learn more: https://help.simplyprint.io/en/article/connecting-bambu-lab-printers-to-simplyprint-xqlhtd/
When you receive a Bambu Lab integration beta invitation, you have to install our Bambu Lab Client software on a device. This device can be a Windows, Mac or Linux-based computer, like a Raspberry Pi. So, you don't have to install anything on the Bambu Lab printer itself, but will need an external device on the same network as your Bambu Lab printer(s). A Raspberry Pi 4B, 2+GB RAM is recommended.
The device that runs our Bambu Lab Client will have to be turned on at all times - if it's turned off, your printer(s) will be offline and unavailable in SimplyPrint.
The Bambu Lab Client connects wirelessly to one or multiple Bambu Lab printers.
You can already learn more about the Bambu Lab Client in this article: https://help.simplyprint.io/en/article/connecting-bambu-lab-printers-to-simplyprint-xqlhtd/
Development status: what's been causing delays and what does the integration entail?
Integrating with Bambu Lab printers is not easy, as Bambu Lab still provides no official way for us to interact with their 3D printers. We use the built-in Bambu Lab "MQTT" API, that each Bambu Lab printer has.
This is the same API that BambuStudio uses to interact with your printers - but, this API is not documented by Bambu Lab, so the community - and especially the Home Assistant for Bambu Lab project, has been the driving force behind allowing third-party actors, like SimplyPrint, to use this API to interact with the Bambu Lab printers.
This proved more challenging than we had initially imagined, and with the release of A1 Mini, AMS Lite, then A1 and X1E, our workload suddenly increased, as the way these printers work software-wise, are very different model-to-model...
Lastly, a lot of work has been put into the Bambu Lab Client; making it easy-to-use, but mostly having it support multiple platforms; macOS (Intel & Silicon), Windows and a bunch of different architectures. And with a lot of supported platforms came a lot of platform-specific bugs, that we have spent the last ~2 months fixing; suddenly the webcam integration no longer worked for Windows, then the Mac platform had problems downloading files - and the list just grew bigger and bigger.
So, we realized that the scope of this integration had grown - from its already quite-big-size, considering full AMS support, supporting a whole new file format, "3MF splitting" and more. So, we chose to, rather than release a buggy, half-finished integration, to put more work into it, dedicate more resources towards the development, and make it awesome.
Everyone has been super understanding - and trust me; we're as impatient as you all are for this to be out - it's not unfinished for lack of effort from the incredible team's side - that's for sure! We look forward to inviting you real soon!
✨ New feature: Webhooks
One of our goals for SimplyPrint, is to make it easy to integrate with our platform, to further enrich your workflow, by allowing for integrations with third-party platforms. An important step towards being more integration-friendly, is the new webhooks feature!
Webhooks is a way for us to tell external services, when a specific action happens in SimplyPrint. This may be "Alert my service, when a print is finished" - with this webhook active, SimplyPrint will now notify the given service, that a print is finished. You can learn more about what a webhook is, here (Wikipedia link).
Webhooks are an advanced feature, mostly made for developers, so worry not if you don't know what you'd personally use them for right now - your SimplyPrint experience may be improved by the feature's existence, by future third-party integrations!
Webhooks are now available for the Print Farm subscription plan, in the panel, under Settings > Webhooks. You can learn more about the webhook feature here.
Note: Future third-party integrations will be able to create webhooks for accounts, regardless of their plan.
✨ New feature: Single sign-on (SAML) support
Accounts with the Print Farm or Schools subscription, can now enable "SAML" Single Sign-On (SSO) via their organization settings.
For schools, this allows your school to be visible on the SimplyPrint login page.
Full changelog & "coming soon"
As usual, we'll end with a little summary. This time around, it's quite smaller than it used to be - which came as a surprise to us, but which we also quickly realized simply meant, that there simply haven't been many bugs to squish. So, we've been able to focus more on new features and additions, rather than fix old ones 💪
- ✨ Webhook feature release (learn more here)
- ✨ Single sign-on support (SAML) feature release
- ✨ Revamped login & signup flow; select your school or institution directly from the login page, for SSO support & more
- Full support for the danish educational institution login service, "Unilogin"
- 🐛 Fixed printer sorting: has been semi-broken for some users - should now be much more stable
- 🐛 Fixed problem where the amount of extruders of a printer wasn't properly synced to the OctoPrint Printer Profile
- 🐛 Fixed bug where filament type name sometimes didn't show in filament list
- 🐛 Fixed problems with loading slicer on Chromium based browsers due to some cookie issues
- 🐛 A bunch of bug fixes for the Bambu Lab pre-beta integration
- 🐛 Fixed Queue Matching Color Criteria not reacting properly to assigned spools
- 🐛 Print queue fix "delete last queue group" bug resulting in having to reload the page
- 🐛 Removed double filename in Quick Queue popup
- 🐛 Fixed the long-time bug of matching/Gcode Analysis/tag issues with printer, in the printer select, not showing on hover (they were always meant to show, but only did about 20% of the time... Always did show on click of course, but this provides a better quick overview!)
- 🐛 Fixed bug where when you select printers for a file, if the selected printer did not have the right material or tags next time you entered the printer selector, the printer would show as deselected, although the selection of it was still saved (now it keeps the selection, regardless whether it's a match now)
- 🐛 Removed extruder icon & number on "Filament usage" displays where only 1 extruder was used
- 🐛 A bunch of general performance & connection-wise fixes related to the December 2 update
Coming soon
- File system update:
- Better drag & drop support
- UI update & general improvements
- Ability to multi-select files when adding to queue or importing files to the slicer
- Add multiple files to the queue (https://suggestions.simplyprint.io/97)
- With support for tagging print queue items before they're added to the queue (system-wide)
- Bulk-tagging printers & files (https://suggestions.simplyprint.io/108)
- Ability to pay by invoice & bank transfers (if the invoice exceeds a certain amount)
- (Hopefully) PayPal payment option (waiting on PayPal for this one 🤞)
- Full release of the "Courses" feature, which is currently in closed partner testing
- Log in & sign up with Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft & more
- OrcaSlicer integration, and hopefully PrusaSlicer and SuperSlicer too! (same type as the Cura integration)
- Direct Prusa Integration public beta release