Sometimes it is really useful to monitor appliances in the smart home as well as control them and it can be really useful to know when an appliance has completed its function or finished its cycle. One such appliance in our contextual smart home is our Ender 3 Pro 3D printer.
Our Home Control System uses models for all the connected appliances. Our technology abstraction means that any appliance added to our smart home inherits all of its capabilities. Essentially, every connected appliance becomes instantly very smart and they can all be monitored and controlled by any of the many user interfaces available, providing a great user experience. Our Home Control System is tracking things like on time, off time, power usage, etc. Appliances can also generate voice announcements and notifications if needed.
Appliances like our 3D printer can report three states back to our Home Control System using our unified communications protocol: On, Finished and Off. There are also various attributes that can be included in the generated events, such as power usage, measured voltage, measured current, etc. By default, our contextual smart home is monitoring how long devices and appliances are on and off and it is very easy to set limits, which when crossed will result in a notification and generate a voice announcement.
The main reason for tracking the use of our 3D printer was to know when a print job has been completed. We can do this by monitoring the ac power connection and ac power usage. A fairly specialist power monitoring system is required because the power used by a 3D printer is very low and none of the smart plugs we have used will be able to reliably detect power usage at such low levels.
When a current 3D print job has been completed, our contextual smart home can generate send a notification and generate a voice announcement. Voice announcements only occur between 7am and 11pm, to avoid being too annoying.
It would be very easy to control the power to this printer, to switch the printer on and off but we have not felt the need to do this yet.
The notification delivered when each print job has completed.
"The Ender 3 Pro print job has finished." - A whole home voice announcement made between certain hours, when a print job has finished.
