Sunday 28 April 2013

Botqueue is amazing at queueing reprap prints and managing botfarms!

A while ago I posted about BFQ - my design for a Bot Farm Queue to manage my printers for me:
http://hughht5.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/how-to-control-multiple-3d-printers-bfq.html

graphmastur kindly told me about Botqueue.com which is very similar to the design I proposed and is now very reliable. The open source software is being worked on almost everyday by Zack Hoeken and other commiters and any bugs you raise are quickly sorted out.

I have been using botqueue for probably 99% of my prints since mid february and have had almost no issues with it. The only time I haven't used it was when I tried to print a 100MB STL file of a statue which was too big to upload to botqueue.com

As you can see on their stats page I am their biggest user with my trusty printrbot taking the lead:
http://www.botqueue.com/stats
I am about to add 4 more printers to botqueue which may increase my lead, but competition aside people really should start using it more. Its a great tool once your printers are set up perfectly and just work every time.

The printing process is now much simpler. I can upload either an STL file or a gcode file to my botqueue account. If I upload an STL it will be sliced with my default settings. When a printer becomes available the next job on the queue is downloaded and the printer starts again.

I've just persuaded a friend to start using Botqueue as he normally prepares files in his bedroom then walks downstairs with an SD card to start the prints in his garage. With a simple webcam (which Botqueue supports) he can now start prints from his room and watch on the webcam if anything goes wrong.

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