Add some way to tag prints for easy auditing

Feature Requests & Ideas
1

We have a formlabs printer in a makerspace, but one problem we always have is trying to audit resin usage so people can pay for what they use. The simplest thing I can imagine would be some way to add a name, or any other arbitrary tag (say customer if you wanted to audit print costs for jobs) so that after the fact we could look at the print log and determine who used what.

Basically our current system is a notebook, which people often forget to fill out, and trying to track down members after the fact is a pain. If you could submit your name as part of submitting the job, it would make things easier to organize.

1 Like
2

You mean like just adding the name in front of the print job name?

1 Like
3

As said prior but more in depth as an idea.

Add the customer # or name in the “.preform” file you are printing.

Preform can estimate resin volume used for a print so you can calculate cost of resin per print (I do this at work).

Formlabs dashboard can also track resin used, as well as time taken to print. You can calculate power usage from this.

Include labour costs, design costs etc and Bob’s your uncle. A fairly accurate way of costing up printing!

You can create a spreadsheet of customer names and generate a customer reference number for each, add a row for file name for reference, and then additional rows for info you want. I.e like mentioned above, resin volume, print time, design time.

All of which can give you price estimates. Just don’t charge for failed prints. A company charged me for this once, dick move! Not my fault the print failed! (Sorry, my vent is over)

4

this not so coincidentally crosses over to my request for breaking down resin use in a preform file by support/model for each object; so this can be done. I have lots of projects with a few tall pieces and lots of short pieces. It’d be nice to have an easy to audit way to break cost down between customers there.

5

yea add that in dashboard, also make color layout so i can make multiple models red, green and so on for same user or same resin. So it sum up all red or green milliliters of resin and you have view of everything, I think this is not too difficult to add in dashboard, at least only in dashboard and later you connect with printer.