In the early 2000s I worked at an on-campus lab that did 3D printing back when that required machines that were 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars. One of the machines built blocks of paper that were each laser cut and laminated to one another. The company that made it went out of business and there wasn’t any software support. Many of the supported printers had tools to email when various events happened and we used that to page employees to come in and remove finished prints or whatever needed to be done.
This machine didn’t have that capability nor any obvious extension points. I ended up writing a VB app that would pill the serial port, which the machine used to talk to the control system, and if the serial port was busy and then became free, send an email. Email was sent by writing a very simple SNMP client.
That program ended up working for another, lower cost 3D printer that we acquired later as well.
I ended up extending for a 3ᴿᴰ printer to tail its log and look for a message it emitted when prints finished.
We share it with a few places and got one of the printer companies to add email support later.
This machine didn’t have that capability nor any obvious extension points. I ended up writing a VB app that would pill the serial port, which the machine used to talk to the control system, and if the serial port was busy and then became free, send an email. Email was sent by writing a very simple SNMP client.
That program ended up working for another, lower cost 3D printer that we acquired later as well.
I ended up extending for a 3ᴿᴰ printer to tail its log and look for a message it emitted when prints finished.
We share it with a few places and got one of the printer companies to add email support later.