3DPrinterOS250+ students, up to 120 printers, one lab
Managing a large number of 3D printers at the same time is not easy. Duke's lab needed to run up to 120 printers, used every day by more than 250 students for their scientific work, making both prototypes and final products.
Before 3DPrinterOS the team topped out at 8 printers and around 150 print jobs a month. Files moved on SD cards, there was no shared queue, and nobody could see print time or filament use across the lab.
One cloud platform for every printer and student
Duke adopted 3DPrinterOS, a cloud 3D printer management platform. It removed the need for SD cards and introduced print queues and file management, and it calculates print time and filament use for every job.
Students can control printing from anywhere: the interface shows the stage of each job and a live stream shows the actual print, so they no longer have to stay in the lab. Built-in tools let them upload, fix and prepare files for more than 160 printer models without any other software.
An optimal workflow with actionable insights
3DPrinterOS let Duke's lab bring almost seven times more printers into service and print more than 9,000 kg of material since they started.
Monthly volume grew from about 150 print jobs to as many as 6,000, a load the team says would be nearly impossible to manage without 3DPrinterOS. The lab has now recorded more than 100,000 printing hours on the platform.
