Farm Command Center
The Farm Command Center is Printbuddy’s high-level operations dashboard for managing a multi-printer farm. It is designed as the “control room” view: quick printer status, active production work, fleet groups, queue health, inventory warnings, maintenance attention, and a dedicated TV Mode for wall displays or shop-floor monitors.
Use it when you want a fast answer to:
- Which printers are currently printing?
- Which printers are paused, idle, offline, or in alert state?
- What production projects are active?
- Which queue items are running or waiting?
- Are any filament spools low?
- Is maintenance due soon?
- Do I need operator attention somewhere?
- Can I open a full-screen farm monitor on another display?
In Printbuddy, open: Farm Command Center The page is also linked from the main application navigation when the feature is available.
From the Farm Command Center, you can open TV Mode using the TV Mode button/link.
The Command Center combines several live data sources into one overview.
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Printing | Printer is actively running a job |
| Paused | Printer is paused and may need operator attention |
| Idle | Printer is online and ready |
| Alert | Printer reports an error or HMS condition |
| Offline | Printer is unreachable or not connected |
Printer states use the same shared status classification logic as other Printbuddy views, so stale completed print metadata should not incorrectly count as active printing.
Farm Command Center supports printer fleet groups.
Groups are useful when you split printers by:
- room
- rack
- material type
- customer/production line
- printer model
- maintenance zone
- operator responsibility
Examples:
Rack A Bambu Lab Klipper Printers High Temperature Prototype Bench Production Farm
Groups are stored as printer fleet groups and are mapped by printer ID. A printer can be shown as part of its configured group, helping you understand capacity and problems by area instead of looking at a flat printer list.
The dashboard shows currently active production projects and summarizes their progress.
For each active project, Printbuddy can show:
- project name
- project description
- project color
- completed parts / target parts
- completed plates / target plates
- queue count
- failed count
- overall progress percentage
Progress is calculated from project data when available:
- progress_percent, if the project provides it
- completed parts vs target parts
- completed plates vs target plates
This makes Farm Command Center useful for batch production work, not just individual printer monitoring.
Farm Command Center also tries to connect active projects to live and queued work.
It checks:
- queue items linked to a project
- queue items currently pending or printing
- running printer jobs that appear to match an active project name
This allows the Command Center to show a short “what is actually happening right now” list for each active project.
Example:
Demo Bambu Lab P1S - Gridfinity Tray - 42%
Voron 2.4 - Cable Clip Batch
Queued: Honeycomb Wall Panel
This is intentionally a dashboard-level summary. For deeper project details, use the project pages.
The Command Center includes queue awareness, including:
- queued work
- currently printing queue items
- completed items
- failed items
- project-linked queue work
This is especially useful when running multiple printers because you can quickly see whether the farm is blocked by printer availability, failed jobs, or lack of queued work.
Farm Command Center builds an alert list from multiple sources.
Printer alerts include:
- printer error state
- HMS errors
- paused printers
- offline printers
Examples:
PRINTER OFFLINE
PRINT PAUSED
Printer reported an alert state
3 printer errors reported
Farm Command Center checks inventory/spool data and reports low filament.
A spool is considered low when its remaining percentage is below its configured low-stock threshold, or the global default threshold if the spool has no custom value.
The remaining percentage is calculated from:
(label weight - used weight) / label weight
Maintenance alerts are based on enabled maintenance items that are either:
- due
- approaching the warning threshold
This allows the Command Center to highlight machines that need attention before failures become production blockers.
The Farm Command Center includes a live clock in the top right.
It displays:
- current time
- current date
- live status indicator
This makes the page suitable for a control-room display or a browser tab left open on a shop-floor screen.
The TV Mode is the display-focused version of the farm overview.
Open it from the Farm Command Center via: TV Mode
TV Mode is intended for:
- wall-mounted displays
- tablets
- kiosk browsers
- monitoring screens
- always-on production dashboards
TV Mode focuses on the information you need at a glance:
Top header
The header includes:
- current time
- current date
- total printers
- printing printers
- idle printers
- offline printers
- queue size
- active alerts
Main status strip
- The status strip shows:
- number of active printing printers
- next expected completion
- farm utilization percentage
Printer cards
Each printer card can show:
- printer image/model
- printer name
- location
- state badge
- current job
- progress percentage
- progress bar
- ETA
- remaining duration
- current layer / total layers
- nozzle temperature
- bed temperature
- active/loaded filament or spool
The printer cards use the shared Printbuddy printer-state logic, so idle or finished printers should not be shown as actively printing just because stale completed job metadata still exists.
TV Mode uses the shared active spool resolution logic also used by the printer card path.
It can resolve:
- non-AMS loaded spool
- external spool
- AMS slot
- AMS-HT style slot data
- CFS-style slot data where available
- local inventory assignments
- Spoolman slot assignments
- printer telemetry fallback when no assignment exists
This means TV Mode should show the spool for the active slot instead of simply showing the first AMS tray with filament data.
For example, if a printer is actively using AMS tray 2 and that slot is assigned to a Spoolman spool, TV Mode should display that assigned spool.
TV Mode view:
Printers tab view:
TV Mode includes an Active Projects panel beside the printer grid.
It shows:
- active project name
- project description
- progress percentage
- progress bar
- completed parts / target parts
- queued count
- failed count
This panel is intentionally compact so it works on monitoring screens.
TV Mode includes an Alerts panel with active issues from:
- printers
- inventory
- maintenance
The Recent Activity panel summarizes recent printer activity, such as:
- printing
- paused
- stopped
- offline
- error
It is not a full audit log. It is a compact status feed for the monitoring screen.
TV Mode refreshes live data automatically.
The default refresh interval is: 15 seconds
The refresh interval is controlled by the UI preference:
Valid values are normalized between: 5 seconds and 300 seconds
TV Mode refreshes:
- printers
- printer statuses
- queue
- active projects
- local inventory assignments
- local spools
- Spoolman inventory spools, when Spoolman is enabled
- Spoolman slot assignments, when Spoolman is enabled
- maintenance overview
The clock updates independently every second.
TV Mode is designed to adapt to the browser window size.
The layout uses a responsive grid:
- printer cards resize and reflow based on available width
- the status strip stays aligned with the printer-card column
- the right sidebar stays inside the viewport
- active project and alert cards truncate long text instead of forcing horizontal overflow
- narrow windows collapse the sidebar below the main printer column
If the browser window is resized, TV Mode should adapt without requiring a page reload.
- TV Mode is a monitoring view, not a replacement for the full printer detail page.
- It intentionally shows a compact subset of printer controls and state.
- Project matching for running prints can use queue links or project-name matching, so exact project linkage is more reliable than filename similarity.
- If printer telemetry does not report an active tray, spool display falls back to available assignment or telemetry data.
- Very long project names, descriptions, spool names, or filenames are truncated to protect the TV layout.