Ah, admin. The bane of many a professor’s existence. It gets in the way of more important responsibilities like research, class preparation, and student assistance. 3D print lab operators in academic settings face an even higher amount of time-consuming administrative work than other professors, which can significantly impact their productivity and, as a result, the productivity of the print lab overall.

And yet, it’s unavoidable. Or is it?

In today’s blog we’ll discuss how 3D print farm automation can drastically reduce the administrative overhead of running a print lab - while also improving the service quality for students.

Print Lab Admin: Taking Stock

Before we dive into automation, let’s first take stock of what our administrative tasks in a print lab setting even are. Depending on your specific workflow, certain pieces may come to mind first. Sorting through files from students, communicating with them when prints are done, reviewing profiles, and letting them know when their print has failed (and helping them fix the issue) are some of the common ones we hear from lab operators.

But there’s also actually starting the prints (and removing them), maintaining printers, and maybe even attempting to coordinate with professors (keyword: attempting) to avoid the mid-term and final project spikes that tend to push print labs to their limits. Maintenance and print start/removal often get overlooked simply because they’re physical tasks - but printing out worksheets for class is admin and it too is physical. To take accurate stock it’s important to remember: just because a task happens physically on your printers doesn’t mean it’s not admin.

It’s helpful to step back and observe all these little bits and pieces, because hyperfocusing on one type of admin work (e.g., emails) can lead you to overlook improvements to other areas that would reduce the overall administrative overload.

Streamlining Admin

What do we do with admin work? We streamline it.

In traditional admin work, this often means batching. Spending a set amount of time each day, week, month, or semester on writing emails, communicating with students, completing budget requests, etc. Office hours are a great example of batching student communications.

Batching is also a common way of reducing the administrative overhead of 3D printing, but it has certain pitfalls - fails become larger, travel time of the nozzle adds up - and is limited by the size of the printer and part. For academic print labs, batching is usually not even possible, because each student’s print is unique and changing the layout to fit more on a bed would increase risk of both of them failing.

Certain tasks, like communication, could theoretically be batched or automated. But automating student notifications or batching emails hardly helps when you’re still being interrupted every hour by new prints finishing or being submitted.

So what can we do?

The answer is we must automate the entire process, not just individual tasks, to streamline the overall workflow.

Reducing Admin Overhead Through Automation

Earlier, we identified our administrative tasks as the following:

• Receiving file submissions
• Reviewing files
• Starting prints
• Removing prints
• Notifying students of completion/fail
• Assisting students with failed prints
• Printer maintenance

Most of these tasks need to be done daily, which adds up very quickly. It’s no wonder print lab operators often feel overwhelmed when file submissions begin to spike near the end of term.

We’ll go through point-by-point to explain how 3D print farm automation, specifically our solution AutoFarm^3D™, eliminates the bulk of this administrative work.

File Submission

When working with academic print labs, we provide the option of adding a custom portal that allows students to submit files without going through a middleman. From this portal they also have the ability to check the status of their print and check which printer it is on (this will come in later). A simple whitelist can be used to restrict access or if the list would be too long, it can be connected to your institution’s existing login system.

Reviewing Files

You have the option to lock down the profiles students can use. If a file with the wrong profile is submitted, the file will be rejected and the student will be notified as to why. This works with a variety of slicers including Bambu, Orca, Prusa, and Cura. 

Starting Prints

AutoFarm^3D is a fully centralized system. When prints are submitted, they go to a central queue which is connected to all your printers. You let the software know what material/nozzle is on each printer and with this information, AutoFarm3D automatically routes print jobs in the queue accordingly. The second a printer becomes free, the software finds the next print that matches that printer and sends it out.

Since most print labs tend to stick to a limited selection of materials/colours, AutoFarm^3D maintains the first-come-first-serve workflow that you likely already operate under. The only time this is subverted is if, for example, a printer with white PLA becomes available, but the next print in the queue requires black PLA. In this case, the next print that requires white PLA will be sent to that printer.

Removing Prints

Many print labs are happy with just the workflow software since it alleviates so much overhead, but they’re missing out on the efficiency gained from 24/7 printing. Auto part ejection is integrated with AutoFarm^3D, allowing the system to remove a print, run a bed level/calibration check, and then immediately start the next print in the queue.

A small tangent on auto part ejection: our philosophy is to streamline what we can, work with what we already have, and avoid introducing unnecessary potential points of failure. Thus, our auto part ejection solution is minimalistic. It requires only two small changes to your printer: a new print surface (the VAAPR™ bed which is specifically formulated for auto part release) and either two small tilt brackets or a bed flexor (depending on printer model). These adjustments generally take around 3 minutes to install and provide safe and reliable auto part ejection.

Notifying Students

When a print finishes, the student to whom it belongs will be notified via email that their print is ready for pickup. With auto part ejection, they are informed which printer it was completed on. This way, they can simply go to the lab, find the printer, and pick up their print without you or your staff coordinating it for them.

Assisting Students With Fails

While AutoFarm^3D can’t actually teach students how to avoid print fails (yet), it can detect print fails as they occur, using QuinlyVision AI, and automatically respond by pausing or ending the print to avoid wasting time and filament. QuinlyVision will let you know what kind of print fail was detected and the progress of the print at time of detection. With this information and the time saved from other tasks being automated, you’re set up to more efficiently and effectively help students who do encounter an issue.

Maintaining Printers

Finally, our last administrative task: printer maintenance. Much like the previous point, AutoFarm^3D cannot actually do the printer maintenance for you (as it’s a software it unfortunately lacks opposable thumbs), but it can reduce the frequency of required maintenance while also making it easier to schedule in.

AutoFarm^3D’s queueing system automatically load balances across all your printers, so there’s no favouritism shown toward the ones near the door. This results in a more even use of all machines, so instead of running one printer into the ground until increasingly poor calibration leads to a nozzle blob, all your printers are utilized equally. Plus, with part removal automated, you have fewer people touching printers, which means it will have to be recalibrated less frequently.

Proactively maintaining printers becomes much easier when your overall operation is more efficient. Small printing businesses, who are highly concerned with maximizing uptime, often report that in their current (pre-AutoFarm^3D) operation they experience around 30% downtime due to filament switches and print start/removal. After they automate, their output increases by at least 25%.

Academic print labs, with their variable demand and educational focus (rather than production-driven), often experience anywhere from 50% to 90% downtime. If a small business could maintain pre-automation productivity with 3/4 of the printers, a print lab could do so with half or less. This means that taking a printer or two offline for scheduled preventative maintenance (which can easily be done by a trained student) is no big deal, even in the middle of midterms or finals.

Improving Lab Services

Automating all the tasks listed above leads to significant improvements in the quality of your print lab’s service. It makes turnaround times faster and print status/progress more accessible, so students have a better experience using it. Fails are mitigated due to more even printer use (resulting in less emergency maintenance), and when they do occur they’re caught before they damage your machine.

The other reason your print lab’s service improves is you. With your main administrative tasks automated or significantly reduced, you’re left with much more time to focus on more important tasks. Maybe you run more workshops on proper design or slicing, or spend more time one-on-one training students to assist you in print lab operations. Your workload becomes much more manageable, and you finally have the time to sit down and plan projects that will bring value to your lab.

Setting Up For Success

3D print lab operators deal with an intense amount of administrative work that can easily overtake your time and drain your energy. The key to reducing this overhead is automating the workflow, instead of fixating on improving the efficiency of specific tasks. In doing so, you can not only make your print lab more efficient, productive, and effective, but you can also expand services while reducing your workload.

Ready to streamline your print lab’s operations? Contact us for a personalized walkthrough of AutoFarm^3D to find out how it can help make your workflow more efficient and effective.

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

Block quote

Ordered list

1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 3

Unordered list

• Item A
• Item B
• Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript