Production Run

Scan a plate. Watch finished units count themselves.

If you run a print farm, you know the questions that eat your day: how many good parts do we actually have? How many finished units is that? When will this batch be done? And the expensive one — a customer asks for 500 pieces by the 20th, and you honestly don't know if you can say yes.

This guide hands you the fix. You'll build the exact production tracker I use to run my own farm — with AI, without writing a single line of code.

What you'll build
A mission control that lives on your own computer, reachable from any phone on your shop Wi-Fi:

• Scan-to-count — every build plate gets a QR label. Pull it off the printer, scan it (barcode gun or phone camera), and its parts land in the tally instantly
• Units, not just parts — it knows your product's recipe, so good parts roll up into finished units automatically; bad parts get deducted in two taps with a reason, and your true scrap rate builds itself
• Reads your sliced files — drag in a .3mf and it extracts the parts per plate, print times, filament weights, even the plate thumbnails
• Real finish dates — it models your actual shop (your hours, your work days, the plate you start on your way out the door) and turns "plates left" into a date you can promise a customer
• A capacity calendar — every printer you own, every day of the month: busy, free, or overbooked. Committed future orders reserve their machines in advance
• Filament planning — kilograms used, kilograms to go, spools to order

What's inside

• A step-by-step guide (PDF, 17 pages) — every instruction, in order
• An interactive version (HTML) with one-click copy buttons for every prompt
• 10 copy-and-paste prompts that build the whole tool, plus setup and a day-to-day playbook

Why farm owners love it

• Answers the customer call — "can you do 500 by the 20th?" becomes one glance at a calendar
• Honest numbers — scrap tracked with reasons, tallies that never lie, history with undo
• Private & local — runs 100% on your computer. No cloud, no logins, nothing shared. Ever.
• No subscription — no monthly anything. Build it once, run it free, ask AI for new features whenever you want

Who it's for
Anyone running multiple 3D printers as a business — Etsy sellers, contract print farms, product makers — who's tired of sticky notes and spreadsheet guesses. Beginners welcome. If you can copy, paste, and describe your shop in plain English, you can do this.

What you'll need
A Mac or Windows computer that stays in the shop, and the Claude app (building software needs a paid Claude plan, $20/mo). A USB barcode scanner ($25) is a nice-to-have — your phone's camera works too. The tool you build is then free to run forever on your own machine.

A note on what you'll get
Your tracker will look a little different from the screenshots — and that's the point. Because you describe your printers and your schedule, it gets tuned to you. Same smart production brain, your flavor.

From my bench to your project. — Chris, OffDaBench