Is there any chance of an API facility being added to 3D Hubs in the future for managing printers and materials? I currently have two printers on my hub and make all my filaments available on both at the same layer heights and prices. I’d very much like to be able to develop a little app which I can use to update my hub without having to scroll up and down the management page and make sure I’m keeping everything in sync.
This would also help out with @gddeen’s request for a CSV file generator as well, as given a nice JSON API, this would most likely be pretty easy to make. I’d be happy to pop whatever I came up with on GitHub to share with the community in case anyone else would find it useful
5 Likes
gddeen
2
Waiting for a FULL API implementation yikes…
I was just going to write a shell script to wget, stick a button into it, browse it, punch the button and it saves the CSV.
Then, import that as a spreadsheet which I could use to mark off which items were in which build plate, decrement
counts. I label bags and put each part into a bag so customer doesn’t have to figure which part is what.
I also have an invoice I print, so the CSV could prefill that.
I printed the order page and the last page ate up a whole sheet of toner. So I want to avoid that route. (I guess background print must be ‘on’ somewhere).
Yup, I can definitely see how this would be helpful, thanks for the suggestion!
@Brian @Filemon is there anything of sorts on the roadmap for Teleport?
2 Likes
gddeen
4
Opening it to an API also gives quick access to price shoppers. Find the lowest price anyways with shipping.
So, if it is wide open access, one would want automatic shipping charges possibly, automatic prices without
bothering a hub owner. The site should then have predictive turnaround on queued up work in each printer.
So, If I’m printing now (a 19 hr job) and I have 2 more lined up at 15 hrs each, and someone wants a 3 hr print
but all my printers are printing there is a problem for the customer.
I an a Rookie, and I don’t know how to handle 3 job requests since I try and give same day service. Do I reject?
Do I accept and ask them if they can wait and pay when I’m ready to print? I dunno…
That’s a step on from what I was imagining, but pretty cool to consider. I think it is probably up to the hub owner to manage some of that though (printer workload, shipping). For example, I’d tend to ship tracked if the value of the order is above a certain amount.
Brian
6
Cool idea @markembling, luckily more and more parts of our service are using API’s under the hood, so sooner or later we’ll make them available to our Hubs. We don’t have a very defined timeline for this yet, but this is a good thread to collect idea on so we can keep your ideas in mind when we get to it.
nudge: @Bram @emanuele3d
I second this suggestion very strongly. We have a hub with 20 printers, and need to manage our orders in our internal system.
1 Like
Any updates on this? I agree that an API would definitely be very useful!
