“You don’t know what you go ’til it’s gone” is a great song line, but a terrible inventory management approach. As I start to stock up on filament for the 3D printer, it occurred to me that I need a way to track my inventory.
The Community Comes Through
I searched around for different filament management solutions and landed on Spoolman. It seemed a pretty solid fit for what I needed. The owner also configured builds for container images, so it was fairly easy to configure a custom chart to run an instance on my internal tools cluster.
The client UI is pretty easy to use, and the ability to add extra fields to the different modules makes the solution very extensible. I was immediately impressed and started entering information about vendors, filaments, and spools.
Enhancing the Solution
Since I am using a Bambu Labs printer and Bambu Studio, I do not have the ability to integrate Bambu into Spoolman to report filament usage. I searched around, but it does not seem that the Bambu reports such usage.
My current plan for managing filament is by weight the spool when I open it, and then weighing it again after each use. That difference is the amount of filament I have used. But, to calculate the amount remaining, I need to know the weight of an empty spool. Assuming most manufacturers use the same spools, that shouldn’t be too hard to figure out long term.
Spoolman is not quite set up for that type of usage. Weight and spool weight is set at the filament level and cannot be overridden at the spool level. Most spools will not be exactly 1000g of filament, so the need to track initial weight at the spool level is critical. Additionally, I want to support partial spools, including re-spooling.
So, using all the Python I have learned recently, I took a crack at updating the API and UI to support this very scenario. In a “do no harm” type of situation, I made sure that I had all the integration tests running correctly, then went about adding the new fields and some of the new default functionality. After I had the updated functionality in place, I added a few new integration test to verify my work.
Oddly, as I started working it, I found 4 feature requests in that were related to the changes I was suggesting. It took me a few nights, but I generated a pull request for the changes.
And Now, We Wait…
With my PR in place, I wait. The beauty of open source is that anyone can contribute, but the owners have the final say. This also means the owners need to respond, and most owners aren’t doing this as a full time job. So sometimes, there isn’t anything to do but wait.
I’m hopeful that my changes will be accepted, but for now, I’m using Spoolman as-is, and just doing some of the “math” myself. It is definitely helping me keep track of my filament, and I’m keeping an eye on possible integrations with the Bambu ecosystem.
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