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 buildA 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 forAnyone 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 needA 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 getYour 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
