spoolbook — a filament notebook
a personal FDM print-tracking app — filaments, spools, profiles, and prints — built to stop guessing why a print failed when the only thing that changed was the weather.
melbourne has four seasons in one afternoon. everyone here says it, and everyone here is right, and it turns out that’s a genuinely annoying property for a hobby that cares about ambient temperature and humidity.
a print would come out perfect on tuesday and stringy on wednesday, same filament, same profile, same everything i could see. the only thing i couldn’t see was the weather doing whatever melbourne weather does. so i started writing it down. then i started writing down which spool. then which printer. then which sliced file, because i kept reprinting the same .3mf after a failure and losing track of which attempt was which.
that’s the moment a notes app quietly becomes a database schema.
the domain escalated fast
what i thought was one thing — “a filament” — turned out to be at least three: the type you’d search a catalog for, the actual physical roll on my desk, and the settings i used with it. all slightly different problems wearing the same name.
somewhere in there i also realized editing a setting after a print happened was quietly rewriting history — the record would claim i used something i didn’t. fixing that took more thought than i expected for what started as “just write down which spool i used.”
the part i didn’t expect to need
ambient conditions. turns out “was it the settings or was it just humid” is a question worth actually being able to answer, not just ask rhetorically after a bad print.
no printer telemetry yet — that’s a deeper rabbit hole than i’m ready for, so it’s manual entry for now, until manual entry gets annoying enough to justify solving properly.
filament catalog, or: how a side project got a side project
typing out “bambu lab pla matte, charcoal” by hand every time got old fast, so the catalog needed to sync from somewhere. that somewhere became its own separate repo, which is probably the dangerous part — a filament tracker now depends on a scraper depending on other sites staying roughly the same shape. “for now” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
where it is now
it runs, it tracks prints, and it’s already answered “was it the settings or was it just humid” more than once. not glamorous. but neither is guessing.
code’s at github.com/t2vi/spoolbook, full feature rundown’s on the project page — this one’s just the why.