SnapCon is a local-first fleet management platform built primarily for Snapmaker U1 print farms.
The project was created to manage my own small farm of 25 Snapmaker U1 printers. Its architecture, interface, and ongoing development are centered around the capabilities, workflows, and operational needs of the U1.
SnapCon provides a single interface for monitoring, controlling, and managing multiple printers without requiring printer activity or operational data to be sent to a third-party cloud service.
For Snapmaker U1 farms, SnapCon provides capabilities such as:
- Centralized printer and fleet monitoring
- Active print-job tracking
- Job controls and printer-management actions
- Camera snapshots and printer previews
- Four-toolhead status and material monitoring
- Toolhead and filament mapping
- Compact and detailed dashboard views
- Printer sorting, grouping, and organization
- Farm-level visibility across multiple U1 printers
- Home Assistant integration
- Optional secure remote access
- Local operation without a mandatory cloud dependency
SnapCon communicates directly with each U1 through its local Klipper and Moonraker interfaces. Nothing needs to leave the local network unless Remote Access is explicitly enabled.
Support for additional printer platforms was added in response to requests from users with mixed printer farms. Experimental connectors currently include selected FlashForge, Creality, and generic Klipper/Moonraker printers.
These additional connectors are not the main focus of the project and may not provide the same depth of functionality, testing, or integration available for the Snapmaker U1. SnapCon’s development priorities remain focused on the U1 and its specific capabilities.
SnapCon began as a personal project for managing my own printers. An early version used Danny Gimbell’s U1Hub project as a starting point. Since then, the codebase, architecture, functionality, and direction have changed substantially, and SnapCon has developed into a separate project.
SnapCon is intended primarily for Snapmaker U1 owners and farm operators who need a practical, centralized, and locally controlled way to manage multiple printers from one interface.
Enjoying SnapCon? Consider buying me a coffee (or two).
Every bit helps fund new printers so I can expand support to more models.
SnapCon has one fleet view that reshapes itself into four different layouts, cycled with the view
button in the top bar (⊞ icon). Which views that button cycles through or whether it just toggles one specific view on and off is configurable in Settings → View → Alternate Display.
The default view, every printer as a full card: stats bar, filament lanes, progress, and every control
on screen at once. Best for smaller fleets, or whenever you want the complete picture for each printer without drilling in.
The same cards, shrunk down, smaller stats, fewer buttons, no filament-lane detail. Built for fitting a larger fleet on one screen.
A grid focused on each printer's live camera feed, refreshed on an interval you control (with optional staggered refresh so a large fleet's cameras don't all fire at once). Printers without a camera, or with a broken feed, show a retryable placeholder instead. Shares a toolbar with List View: status tabs, tag filter, multi-select with bulk Pause/Resume/Cancel, and tag editing.
The same fleet as a dense, sortable table, one row per printer, with file thumbnail, a real progress bar, remaining time and layer count, and a filament column showing each loaded toolhead as a colored chip. Uses the same toolbar, multi-select, and bulk actions as Camera View.
Regardless of view, when "No Sort" (the default) is selected you can reorder printers manually via
drag-and-drop, dragging from the printer's status badge to the desired position. Sort by Status,
by Time Remaining, or by Name are also available.
For a detailed explanation of the printer card, see the Printer Card documentation.
The Plate button Shows up on a printer card's footer only while it's actively printing or paused, and only when the current print actually has more than one object on the plate.
Clicking it opens a modal with two synced views of the same plate:
- A visual map rendered from the actual gcode object outlines, overlaid on a photo of the real U1 bed so objects appear exactly where they physically sit.
- A list below/beside it, one row per object.
Both are clickable, Clicking an object's shape on the map or its row in the list does the same thing: toggles that object into your selection.
Nothing is sent to the printer yet at this point, it's just building up your selection.
Each object is visually in one of four states:
- Normal, still printing, not selected
- Selected, your current picks (highlighted)
- Currently printing, tagged "printing" (the object the nozzle is on right now)
- Already skipped, grayed out, tagged "skipped", no longer clickable
Once you've selected one or more objects, a Skip (N) button becomes active. Clicking it sends an exclude command for each selected object, one at a time, showing "Skipping N…" then
"Skipped N" when done.
There's no "undo", once an object is skipped, it's permanently marked skipped for that print, same as if you'd excluded it from the printer's own screen.
A thermometer icon in the top bar opens a bulk bed temp. control:
pick any number of online printers, set a target bed temperature,
and optionally enable Staggered heating to start each printer
a configurable number of seconds after the last, rather than all at once.
This is useful on a shared circuit where heating an entire farm's beds
simultaneously could trip a breaker.
Per-printer progress is shown live as each one is set, and closing the dialog stops any staggered run still in progress.
Printer Maintenance lets you specify which component or operation
is under maintenance, Each operation comes with a preconfigured
frequency (based on the manufacturer's recommendations), and the
next maintenance date is scheduled automatically.
A cost parameter was also added to maintenance entries, laying the
groundwork for future TCO (total cost of ownership) tracking.
Additionally, an Offline button lets you take a printer offline
while offline, no actions can be performed on it.
Once set to offline, the button switches to "Online" and clicking
it brings the printer back.
The same panel also shows each printer's total print hours
(pulled from its own history) and an automatic warranty status
active for 12 months from the purchase date you set, then flagged
as expired without you needing to track either by hand.
SnapCon settings can be accessed by selecting the gear icon in the top navigation bar. This opens the Settings screen, where configuration options are organized into separate tabs.
The sections below describe the available options in each settings tab
The General tab contains the core settings that control where SnapCon finds print files, how often it checks printer status, and how print costs are calculated.
- Files: Select the folder SnapCon monitors for sliced .gcode files. A live status message confirms whether the path exists, is accessible, and contains compatible files as you type or use Browse.
- Fleet Polling: Set how often SnapCon checks each printer’s status, from 1 to 60 seconds. A helper message shows the estimated requests per minute and warns when the selected interval may be too aggressive, especially for larger farms.
- Costs: Configure the currency, filament spool cost, and electricity rate per kWh used to estimate print costs on job cards. The ZIP Lookup button can retrieve a suggested local electricity rate from the OpenEI utility-rate database.
- Sending Prints: Choose whether SnapCon displays the color-to-toolhead mapping screen before sending a file. You can also enable automatic matching to the closest available toolhead color or use direct T1 → T1 assignment.
- Application (Docker only): Use Restart App to restart the SnapCon container. This is useful after editing config.json outside SnapCon or pulling a newer container image.
The View tab controls how the printer fleet is displayed and how the view-switch button in the header behaves.
- Use T0/T1/T2/T3 Notation:Changes toolhead numbering from the default 1–4 format to the zero-based T0–T3 format.
- Alternate Display: Selects which view the header’s view-switch button opens or cycles through.
- Open in Compact Mode: Opens the fleet dashboard in the Alternate view instead of Regular view.
- Camera View Refresh Interval: Sets how often camera snapshots refresh while using Camera view.
- Stagger Camera Refresh Across Printers: Distributes camera snapshot requests across the selected refresh interval instead of requesting all printer images at once.
Push notifications for what's happening across your fleet, sent by a
background watcher that runs independently of whether the dashboard is even open.
Configured in Settings → Notifications:
- Enable Notifications, the master switch. Turn it off and everything below stops sending, without losing any of your settings.
- Include camera image, attaches a live snapshot to the notification, if that printer has one.
Events, choose exactly which print events you want to hear about, independently:
- Print started
- Print paused
- Error or failure
- Print finished
Want alerts only when something goes wrong? Turn on just "Error or failure" and leave the rest off.
Milestone updates — a separate switch for progress-percentage alerts, e.g. "50% done." Pick any combination of 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 90% — you're not locked into fixed checkpoints, and a live counter shows how many messages per print your selection adds up to.
- ntfy.sh needs just a topic (think of it as a channel name). Regenerate makes you a fresh random one, and Copy puts it on your clipboard for pasting into the ntfy app. Since anyone who knows your topic can read your notifications, treat it like a shared secret, regenerating immediately cuts off anyone still subscribed to the old one.
- Telegram needs a bot token and a chat ID.
he Printers tab is used to add, configure, organize, and maintain the printers connected to SnapCon. SnapCon is built primarily around the Snapmaker U1. Its Klipper/Moonraker-based connector enables features such as automatic printer detection, identity lookup, and network discovery.
Each printer entry can be expanded to configure the following sections:
- Identity: Printer name, location, and brand label.
- Connection: Printer URL, connector type, optional Moonraker API token, and a Test Connection action that verifies connectivity before saving.
- Hardware: Serial number, Snapmaker U1 pairing access code, purchase date, and estimated power draw in watts. Power usage is combined with the electricity rate configured under General to estimate energy cost per print.
- Behavior:Options such as automatic bed leveling before each print and whether the printer should participate in push notifications.
Printer entries can be searched, collapsed, and reordered by dragging. Additional actions are available from the ⋮ menu (Including: Maintenance history, Move up, Move down & Remove printer)
The Discover Button Scans the local network for supported printers and lets you add them without entering IP addresses manually.
- Scan Scope: Scan all subnets connected to the SnapCon host, or enter a specific subnet or CIDR range. Custom scans are limited to /20 to prevent excessively large searches.
- Discovery Process: SnapCon probes ports 80 and 7125 in parallel, covering Moonraker installations running directly or behind a proxy. A typical /24 scan usually completes in about 10 seconds.
Each result shows the available printer details and an Add button. Printers already configured in SnapCon are marked as Added. During first-time setup, Add All & Save can be used to add all discovered printers at once.
The Users tab controls authentication, account permissions, and one-time-code login. Enable User Access Management, Turns login protection on or off. When disabled, SnapCon remains accessible without authentication. Enabling it requires creating at least one Admin account first, preventing accidental lockout.
Roles: Permissions are enforced in both the interface and the API:
- Admin: Full access, including all Settings pages.
- Regular: Can operate printers and manage jobs, but cannot access Settings.
- View Only: Can monitor the fleet but cannot perform printer actions or access Settings.
User Accounts, Each account can include a display name, username, email address, phone number,
role, and login method.
Users can sign in with either a password or a one-time code.
OTP Configuration: Controls how one-time login codes are delivered. Supported methods include:
- Email through Resend
- Push via ntfy.sh
- Telegram, using the bot configured under Notifications
User Access Management is required for Remote Access. SnapCon will not enable Remote Access unless at least one Admin account exists, and it prevents User Access Management or the final Admin account from being removed while Remote Access is active.
SnapCon can securely expose your printer farm dashboard over the internet, allowing you to monitor prints, manage jobs, and access your printers from a phone or another device while away from home while No router configuration, port forwarding, VPN client, reverse proxy, or manual certificate management is required.
SnapCon uses a managed Cloudflare Tunnel, Instead of opening an inbound port on your router, SnapCon creates an outbound connection to Cloudflare. Cloudflare provides a public HTTPS address and securely relays traffic through the tunnel to your local SnapCon instance.
This means:
- No open inbound firewall ports
- No manual router configuration
- No VPN software required on client devices
- A valid HTTPS address and certificate
- No manual
cloudflaredconfiguration - Remote Access can be enabled directly from SnapCon settings
Remote Access cannot be enabled unless User Access Management is active and at least one user account exists.
Set an average filament cost (per spool) and an electricity rate ($/kWh), and SnapCon estimates filament + energy cost per print (shown on the Selected Model card and in the print-from-printer picker). Don't know your electricity rate off-hand? Enter a US ZIP code and SnapCon looks it up for you (via the OpenEI utility-rate database), pre-filling the field with your local utility's residential rate.
Settings → Firmware → Get Firmware reads the current firmware version from every idle printer in the fleet at once, so you can spot who's behind without opening each printer's own web UI. (One-click Deploy is planned but not implemented yet.)
- Text search across brand, printer name, and state
- Status filter — Idle, Printing, Error, etc.
- Color-family search — type "Yellow," "Red," "Blue," etc. to find printers by filament color
- Progress filter — e.g.
>75%or<30%to filter by print completion
- Collapsible folder/file browser sidebar, with search that recurses into every subfolder (not just the current one)
- Create new folders and upload files directly from your PC, without touching the gcode folder manually
- Multi-select, Explorer-style: Shift-click for a range, Ctrl-click to toggle individual files, then drag the selection onto a folder to move everything at once
- Sort files and select one to send to a printer
- Select multiple printers and send a file, with color-mapped tool assignments
- A progress bar is shown for each printer during a multi-printer upload, indicating its individual status
- Full Spectrum files are detected automatically and flagged with an "FS" badge wherever the filename appears (file list, job title, print-from-printer picker), along with which fork produced them
SnapCon ships a small command-line hook any slicer's post-processing step can call to hand a sliced file straight to a printer, without opening the browser at all:
snapcon-win-x64.exe --load <file> --printer "<name in SnapCon>" [--outputname "<display name>"] [--snapcon <host[:port]>]
--snapcon targets a SnapCon instance running on a different machine than the slicer; omit it when Orca (or
any other slicer) runs on the same machine as SnapCon. This is the same mechanism the Experimental Orca
"Plugin" below is built on.
For those who prefer working with Orca Slicer instead of Snapmaker Orca (Snorca), an option was added to "connect" Orca to SnapCon using the CLI hook above.
This is an experimental feature, to get it working, configure your connection as shown below:
Hostname: enter the actual hostname/IP of the printer
Device UI: enter http://snapcon-ip:4545/orca/Printer-Name-in-SnapCon
After saving, go to the Process settings' Other tab and add a Post-Processing Script, pointing to a batch file that runs:
D:\snapcon-win-x64.exe --printer "U1_White" --snapcon x.x.x.x --outputname "%SLIC3R_PP_OUTPUT_NAME%" --load %1
(If Orca is running on the same machine as SnapCon, --snapcon can be omitted.)
After clicking Upload or Upload/Print — neither of which actually performs an upload or print operation — you can switch to the Device tab to control the printer.
Depending on feedback on this feature, the final GUI in the Device tab may end up matching Snapmaker Orca's (Snorca) Device Control interface exactly.
Running inside a container is auto-detected (no configuration needed) and unlocks a Restart App button
in General Settings — restarts the container in place to pick up a config.json edited from outside SnapCon,
or a freshly pulled image, without needing shell access to the host.
Grab the build for your OS from the Releases page, put it in its own folder, and run it — a browser opens to the dashboard.
- Windows (
snapcon-win-x64.exe): SmartScreen may warn "unknown publisher" (the app isn't code-signed). Click More info -> Run anyway. - macOS (
snapcon-macos-arm64/-intel): right-click -> Open the first time to clear Gatekeeper, or runxattr -dr com.apple.quarantine <file>once. You may need tochmod +xit. - Linux (
snapcon-Linux-x64):chmod +xthen run it.
config.json and a gcode/ folder are created next to the executable on first run.
Use Settings in the page to add your printers.
Already running on port 4545? Only one copy can use the port. If a launch flashes and closes, something else (often a second copy) already has 4545 — close it first.
You need Node.js 18 or newer — get the LTS build from https://nodejs.org and run the installer (defaults are fine). Then:
- Unzip this folder somewhere permanent, e.g.
C:\snapcon. - Start it:
- Windows: double-click
start-windows.bat - Mac / Linux: run
./start-mac-linux.shin a terminal
- Windows: double-click
The first launch installs what it needs (takes a minute) and then opens http://localhost:4545 in your browser.
Use it from your phone: find the IP of the computer running the hub and open
http://THAT-IP:4545on your phone — e.g.http://192.168.1.20:4545. Keep the hub running on a computer that stays on (or set the launcher to run at startup), or turn on Remote Access (above) to reach it from outside your LAN too.
The Settings panel opens automatically the first time. Three steps:
- Add your printers. Click Discover on network to scan your LAN and list any supported printers it finds — click Add on each. (Or Add manually and type an IP.)
- Set your G-code folder. Point it at the folder your slicer saves sliced files to.
- Save.
Reopen Settings anytime with the gear button.
MIT — see LICENSE. Free to use, change, and share.