Adding my new printer to Home Assistant took a matter of minutes and unlocked a bunch of new possibilities for useful, printing-related automations.
Home Assistant works with a wide range of printers
Whatever 3D printer you have, there’s probably an integration you can use to add it to Home Assistant. We’ll focus on Home Assistant here, as the open platform has a very active community of contributors who work tirelessly to make devices like 3D printers work with their smart home servers.
Prusa printers are the only brand with an integration into the main Home Assistant integration repository. You can find PrusaLink by searching for it under Settings > Devices & services using the ‘Add integration’ button. For everything else, you’ll need to install the Home Assistant Community Store, or HACS for short.
HACS is essentially a third-party integration database, with the option to expand the list of integrations by adding custom GitHub repositories. I found the Bamboo laboratory integration into HACS, which allowed me to add my new P2S 3D printer to Home Assistant.
Owners of an Elegoo 3D printer can use the Elegoo Home Assistant integrationCreality owners can use the Creality WebSocket integrationwhile UltiMaker owners use the UltiMaker integration usable. Others include an integration for AnchorMake printers, a formlabs integration, and an integration for Snapmaker printers.
If your brand isn’t listed, you may need to do some research to see what’s available. That said, since the majority of home users own something from Bambu Lab, Prusa, Creality, Elegoo, and Snapmaker, the main bases are covered.
Use your printer’s status in automations
After you add your printer to Home Assistant, you can use the different states of your printer in automations. These measurements and states appear as sensor entities in Home Assistant and function as triggers and conditionals that you can build automations around.
Ventilation is quite important if you have your printer in your home, whether that’s some sort of aftermarket extractor connected directly to the printer or a simple ceiling fan in the same room with a window open. If you have a fan connected to your smart home, via a smart wall switch or a simple smart plug or controller, you can automatically activate the fan when a print job starts (and then stops).
This is just one example of many I came up with with the dizzying array of triggers my Bambu Lab P2S offers me in Home Assistant. There’s even a printer door opening trigger, which I use to activate a light next to the printer, just to test the response time.
The printer also reports errors and error states, allowing you to build a more robust reporting system than the one your printer already uses. I’ve noticed that the Bambu Handy mobile app doesn’t always notify me of a successful print, so I’ve turned off customer notifications and now rely on Home Assistant.
I was also pleasantly surprised when I discovered that the Bambu Lab AMS 2 Pro appears as a separate device in Home Assistant. This multi-filament spool holder and dryer has its own sensors, including the relative humidity in the filament storage container. This includes changes in humidity (perfect for notifications that the filament may be “wet”) and the drying complete status, which I have notified.
Even if you just throw a spare smart humidity sensor in the box where you keep your filament, you can get an alert when the humidity reaches a certain level so you can let it dry again.
Control and monitor the printer in Home Assistant
With so many sensors, it’s easy to keep an eye on your printer in the same place you control the lighting, climate, and other connected devices. You may already be used to using a printer-specific app for this, but there’s no denying that all this information is in one place.
For example, you can build one dashboard for all your printers (and AMS units if you have them), keeping your hobby and the rest of your smart home separate but accessible. The Bambu Lab integration has a surprising number actions that can be sent to the printer, including print commands, loading filament and starting or stopping a drying process.
Some printers can also display the camera feed in your Home Assistant dashboard, so you can integrate it alongside your other cameras to see your printer’s current progress at a glance.
Having a 3D printer with decent Home Assistant integration may even be worth setting up a Home Assistant server if you don’t already have one. If your smart home takes care of the ventilation in your shop (or guest room), a richer notification system could be a real boon for anyone used to managing this sort of thing on their own.
It’s easy to get started because Home Assistant runs on just about everything.
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