Want to manage your ever-increasing collection of 3D printer filament spools? Try SpoolEase.
SpoolEase is an open-source project that provides hardware and software to automatically manage filament spools. It comes in two products: SpoolEase Console and SpoolEase Scale.
SpoolEase Scale, as you might suspect, is used to weigh spools and determine an accurate amount of remaining filament on that spool. SpoolEase Scale requires the presence of SpoolEase Console to use that data.
SpoolEase Console is the brain of the system. It can be used to identify tags for a given spool, where you can track filament colour, vendor, material type, etc. This means you can minimize the possibility of running out of filament on a print job because you can ensure the spool truly has a sufficient amount of material.
In operation, a tagged spool needs only to be exposed to SpoolEase Console, and it will read the NFC tag. This then integrates with Bambu Lab’s AMS system to inform it of which material was loaded. You can see how it works in this short video:
It’s possible to manage several Bambu Lab 3D printers from a single SpoolEase Console, and it even works with systems having more than one AMS.
As you may have guessed, this system is designed for use with Bambu Lab equipment, specifically their X, P, and A models.
However, there’s a problem: Bambu Lab recently implemented a firmware update to increase security. That update had the side effect of cutting off general API access to the machines. That’s the point of the security update: preventing third-party tools from messing with the equipment.
This means that you now cannot use SpoolEase with the current firmware Bambu Lab equipment. However, Bambu Lab understands that some 3D printer operators want to use third-party tools, and they’ve enabled a method of doing so. You must enable a developer mode that places the responsibility for security with the operator. At that point, the machine opens up the MQTT protocol that was used by third-party software to communicate with the equipment.
In other words, SpoolEase should still work, but only when you set up the Bambu Lab equipment properly.
SpoolEase is provided as an open-source project that you can build yourself. For those with larger quantities of random filament, SpoolEase could be a very useful project to set up.
Via SpoolEase
