Filament usage tracking for students at a college?

Hi, So I work at a technical college and we have a lab with multiple 3D printers. Currently we have two Bambu X1 Printers and plan to get about ten more. We are looking for ways that the filament usage can be tracked for each student. With that being said, to utilize remote printing through the cloud server of Bambu studio, you must create an account. That would then require multiple students to be signed into the same account that the Bambu Printer itself is signed into. This is what the students are doing now which is no problem. Although this is an issue in regards to filament tracking since then there is no way to differentiate what students are using how much filament since they must be signed into the same account.

Has anyone found a different hardware solution to tracking filament usage? I reached out to PaperCut and they don’t offer any solutions for 3D printers so I figure this could be something Bambu could implement. It would be great to have a new feature request if Bambu could have some type of SSO where then the instructor could be an admin for the printers, while the students had their own independent accounts where they were still able to print to multiple different Bambu’s. Then the instructor could run print reports on what student used how much filament on each printer.

Welcome to the forum.

You could weight the filament before and after a student prints and keep track of it that way. Bambu studio will also give you an estimated filament usage (by weight) if that is accurate enough for your need.

If you want an integrated solution I would suggest reaching out to the Bambu dealers for the education sector and see what they can come up with.

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Thank you for the helpful link of the Bambu dealers. I will reach out to them and see what they have to say.

Update: the sales representative mentioned it was a great idea but had no additions to suggest. They had but suggested I reach out to Bambu Labs customer support instead…

Funny, is that’s what sales reps are supposed to do on behalf of a customer?

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