So just a few weeks ago,
a friend of ours told us that her son who's 14 and has a 3d printer accidentally
started a 3d printer fire in the middle of the night.
And it caught fire in their house.
Luckily they were able to catch it before it burned the house down,
but definitely a very scary experience. And we're always told,
and you've probably heard this many times,
like I have never leave your printer unattended while it's printing. Now,
you also are probably like me in the sense that you don't want to sit there and,
you know, babysit your printer on a three-day print, for example.
Or sometimes you just want to start something printing when you head off to work
or when you go to bed. And I'm totally guilty of that. I do it all the time,
but I have a little secret up my sleeve that helps me to monitor that and helps
me have someone else babysit it for me.
And that's called the spaghetti detective
Now there is, of course,
a lot that can go wrong while you're not watching your 3d printer.
I keep some of the examples here just as a reminder for myself.
So here's a great one. Look at this mess.
So this is what happens when things got clogged and it just made a total mess
and wasted a whole bunch of filament and was a potentially a fire hazard.
Having something like this, hanging on there,
the spaghetti detective leverages artificial intelligence to keep an eye on your
prints while you're not watching.
So even if you're asleep or you're somewhere else, for example,
it's keeping an eye and looking for what it calls spaghetti,
those little strings of filament that you get when you know,
something's gone wrong and it's got a little meter and it's going to gauge how
successful that print is,
and you can even set it to where it will pause or stop the print.
If something looks way too fishy and it's definitely gone wrong. Now,
in addition to that functionality,
it also gives you the ability to see your prints from anywhere in the world.
So without having to set up a print server, that's externally available,
basically when you use this service, you can just check it out from anywhere.
You have an internet connection. As an example of this, I just started a print.
It's only at 1% right now, but I can actually see the little meter here.
I've got looking good. It can go into the yellow or into the red,
and it's just moving along and everything's looking good.
And it's using this webcam feed to keep an eye on it for me,
which is really awesome. And just gives me some peace of mind.
And this kind of helps put me in the justified camp of letting my prints print.
And if you're doing a three-day print, for example,
there's no way you're going to be able to stay in the same room,
watching the thing the whole time, because you know,
you need to sleep and pee and stuff like that.
So this really helps to facilitate longer prints or prints that you just aren't
able to monitor yourself. Now, full disclosure here,
the spaghetti detective did reach out to me and ask if I would be okay with
doing a video for their service.
But the thing is I actually signed up for their beta back in 2019 in February of
2019.
So I've been using it for years and it's just a really great service that I've
been using personally and would definitely endorse because it just gives me that
peace of mind, knowing that I can check my prints anywhere.
And also that it's keeping an eye on it for me, which I think is awesome. Now,
an important thing to know is that this will not catch every little issue that
with a print, it is entirely possible for a print to essentially fail,
but for it to look to the spaghetti detective,
like it was successful and it will not pause it or even give you warnings in
some cases.
But as soon as you introduce any sort of that stringing or that kind of crazy
hair effect going on in the print,
which is usually a major indicator that something's gone wrong,
it's going to detect that specifically and then pause the print if you want it
to, or you can set it to just to notify you. Now,
Thomas Salanderer did a really comprehensive and really impressive review of
this a little while back.
And so he actually layer shifted some of his prints to see what would happen.
And he noted that it didn't pick up on it. He could see it,
he could see with his own eyes, that things were wrong.
He could even look at the stream of it and notice that something wasn't going
right. But the spaghetti detective didn't recognize that as a failure.
So keep in mind, it's not perfect and it's not going to get all failures,
but as soon as things start to get pretty wacky and you start to get that
streaming happening, that's when it really kicks in. And we'll notice that,
and we'll give you the option to pause or at least notify you about the issue.
Now, along with that,
because the spaghetti detective comes with the ability to access the remote
viewing of your print from anywhere in the world,
you can actually use your phone or another device to check that out and see if
something's going wrong.
And you can pause that any time without being right there at your printer.
All right? So let's see this thing in action and actually see how it works.
So basically right here,
you can see I've got something printing and I've got a meter here with the
green, yellow, and red. And right now it says, everything's looking good.
And what it's doing is it's looking for any of that spaghetti there.
And that little meter will start to move now while the AI service only needs to
look at one frame out of every so many,
to be able to see if anything's going wrong,
it does offer with their premium service,
the ability to stream at 25 frames per second,
so that you get a nice flowing stream and you can see exactly what's happening
here in their preferences.
You have the option to be notified when the print job is done.
So that's kind of handy just to say, Hey, your prints, ready, go take a look.
And you can also be notified if the print gets canceled,
whether by you or by someone else. Now, this is my favorite part. Here.
You can look through here and you can actually get a text message sent to you to
let you know that something's gone wrong. You can use push bullet.
You can use discord, you can use telegram,
you can use pushover and you can even set it up with slack.
So you have a million different ways to actually get notified that something's
gone wrong or that your print is done.
And that way you never have to miss a notification.
And therefore let that thing keep printing,
or just not know if the thing finished now,
we've got some setting options here, which is really nice.
You can actually have it watch for failures or not.
And then you can pause on detected failures or not.
And then you've got the pause and the cancel buttons right here that you can use
to cancel it or pause it manually any time. Okay.
So as I'm recording this and I didn't set this up or anything like that,
but okay. Yeah. As I'm recording this, I'm getting a failure.
So it's actually on my phone. I'm able to see the printer.
That's just right over here in the closet.
It's saying it's moving down and it's not looking quite as good as it was
before. So it's detecting that something may be going wrong.
And it in fact is so there's not a lot of spaghetti on here,
but there is a little bit,
and it looks like basically everything came off the bed on my Ender 3,
and it's moved over out of the shot. And now, yeah,
it just went down even further.
And it's saying something starting to look pretty funky there.
So it's not gotten to the point where it's going to notify me just yet,
because there's not a lot of spaghetti, but as this continues,
it will generate more of that stringing and then it will notify me. So, yep.
Look at that. Literally, as I'm, as I'm recording this, so the spaghetti,
detective your print, um, on Ender, let me, let me take a look at that.
Um, something smells fishy. Printer is not paused.
You can go check it out at the spaghettidetective.com.
So that's kind of lucky that that actually happened while we're filming here.
But, um,
I've got to fix that print now and it figured out that something's going wrong
and let me know right away. So now we're firmly in the fishy area here.
Yep. Okay. So it sees the, there was a print there.
Their print is now missing and that's because every time this thing moves out of
the way from my Okta lapse time lapse, it can see that it's gone wrong.
And there's a piece of moving over on the side.
So it's probably not far from actually pausing that automatically because of how
bad it is. But because of that text message that just saved that print.
So I can now go and take that print off the bed, start it over,
see what went wrong and get it going again.
So I'm going to go ahead and cancel this print right now. So I'm pausing.
In fact, I'm just going to, okay. So it's not, there we go.
Yeah.
Oh, you know what? I didn't have to. So right before I hit, I hit cancel.
It says your print is probably failing. Printer is paused, go check it out.
So I'm going to go back over to it.
And I know that it's failing and it's actually showing me right here on the
screen, a couple of green boxes saying we're finding some spaghetti here,
something went wrong. So I'll hit, cancel on the print.
Are you sure you want to cancel? Yes. Okay.
And I just heard it power down the fans power down. So that's done.
So that just saved that print for me, not the print itself,
but it saved me from wasting more filament and wasting time or thinking that it
was printing successfully.
So here in the web interface of the spaghetti detective,
you can see I've got multiple printers set up and I can control my printers from
here, which is really nice. So we can move things around from here.
If need be one of my favorite features here is being able to go to the
time-lapse here. And from here,
you can take a look at any prints that have already taken place.
Here's an example of one that went wrong. So if we look at this one,
I was printing a monitoring arm for the ender.
You can see everything looks good.
Notice this little black circle right down here.
Here is in one place. And then after a few layers, oh,
it's gone.
All right. So I brought it over to here and it starts detecting it.
It starts to look and say that something's gone wrong.
You can see a little blob over here.
So it's detecting kind of a mix of things that are normal. Like over here,
this is actually just the grid infill.
And it's putting the little green box thinking. Something's weird.
And you can see it's moving along here, down the green,
into the fishy period or fishy zone here.
So it's definitely thinking it's detecting something. And as we move along,
it's seeing that more and more,
even though a lot of this is actually legitimate. So it's, it's trying to help,
but in some cases it's missing,
but what ends up happening is it really does actually detect what goes really
wrong. And it pauses it when it realizes something's definitely wrong.
And that's coming up in just a moment here.
So as we start to get a little higher, it starts to spit out a bunch of that,
a filament and making some real gooey mess here.
Yeah, there we go. So you can see all over. So it,
it found this spaghetti over here.
So it was actually still carrying along and getting most of the parts to
succeed. In fact, several of these, I actually was successfully able to use,
but it started to get turned into a real mess and you can see all over the
place. So it paused that print for me. And I was all set,
I didn't have to worry about that one.
So kind of cool that it's able to detect that this print here is an example of
where it just wasn't sure what it was seeing.
And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that I was printing black
material on a black bed and it wasn't that well lit.
So here at thinks that some of the shininess coming from the sides of the cat
were some sort of a problem, and they weren't,
there's actually nothing wrong in this print went completely successfully. Um,
but you can see it's starting to get into the fishy area here and it thinks that
something's wrong when actually it's totally fine. So luckily in this case,
it was smart enough to know that it wasn't totally fishy or failing.
And so it didn't actually pause the print. It let it print out successfully.
And that was that. Now sometimes like in this video here,
there's not much to report and it's doing what it's supposed to do,
which is just watching it for me and just making sure that I don't have to
babysit it. So you can see the meter is not really moving here at all.
These are a couple of bracket, arms for supporting an led lights,
light bar or light strip.
And I use these in my seven accessories for 3d printing video that I'll put a
link to right up here, but you can see not a lot to report.
It finishes up and this thing is successful and green all the way through.
So we can try out some of the focused feedback here to help the system be a
little bit smarter. And also it usually helps us to get some credit.
So we'll do a focused feedback here. There's only one to look at in this case.
So I'll start that. And it's basically going to say,
do you see any spaghetti in this picture? And of course the answer for us is no.
And that's it. So it says, you just earned two non expirable detective hours.
So that adds to my detective hour account up here.
And that means that I've got that much more to work with in the future,
which is awesome. Now,
if you're interested in learning more about how the service works,
there is a free tier so that you can actually use this without paying anything.
There's a limit on how many hours you can use per month,
as far as monitoring goes.
And if you want to upgrade that you have several options,
you can either go to a premium package where you get an allotted amount of hours
per month,
or you can actually just buy packets of hours and you can pay for those in
clusters. Now,
the good folks over at the spaghetti detective have been kind enough to offer a
coupon code for all viewers of the 3d printing zone.
If you enter in "3dpzone" while checking out in the coupon area,
you can actually get 25% off your order or service.
So definitely a pretty good deal.
I've put a link in the description below that you can use to get right over
there and be sure to remember that even if you do the free trial,
you'll want to apply that discount.
And you can come back to this video to check out that code,
but you want to apply that at the time of purchase,
just to make sure you get your 25% off. Now,
I'd love to hear back if you've had positive experiences, negative experiences,
or maybe just some questions about the spaghetti detective,
feel free to use the comment section below,
and I'll always do my best to reply pretty quickly. As you can imagine,
making these videos definitely takes a lot of time and cost,
a lot of money to produce. And so if you want to help out the channel,
and if you've learned something and want to give back,
there's a couple of ways you can do that.
You can check out my Patreon in the link below,
or you can join on the YouTube membership and support my channel that way.
Thanks so much. Now, if you want to check out exactly how to set up OctoPrint,
which is a prerequisite for using the spaghetti detective,
I've created a video that you can check out right here and I'm Nils with the 3d
printing zone. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time.