If there were a Venn diagram of the 3D printing and Home Assistant community, the overlap would likely be rather large. Many DIY projects, such as those created using ESPHome, wouldn't be complete without a perfectly sized, 3D-printed enclosure. And I'm sure you will find many who run Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi have 3D-printed the case for that too.
It's no surprise then that OctoPrint, which is an application many owners of 3D printers use, has been integrated with Home Assistant since version 0.19. What is a surprise though is that it took until now for OctoPrint to get its very own custom-made Lovelace card.
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One user's solution is a benefit to all
With that in mind, Daniel Greco on GitHub has taken the task of adding the missing piece of the puzzle to Home Assistant. They have and has created a beautiful Lovelace card for any 3D printer that OctoPrint monitors and controls, to be displayed in the Home Assistant dashboard. This card goes by the name threedy.
What is OctoPrint?
A bit of background for those of us that don't own a 3D printer (unfortunately, I'm included in that group): OctoPrint is a web interface for 3D printers. It is open source and supports just about every 3D printer out there. While OctoPrint can run on numerous systems, most users use a cheap Raspberry Pi for it to run on.
Most 3D printers have an integrated display from which you control and monitor everything. But that is where it ends. The 3D printer does not connect to your network out of the box. By using OctoPrint, you can control and monitor every aspect of your 3D printer and any printing jobs right from within your browser.
OctoPrint allows you to actually monitor the physical 3D printer without moving away from your desk. And not just by displaying a series of numbers. You can attach a USB webcam to the Raspberry Pi it is running on and have the video streamed to the web interface. You can even integrate the camera image in to your Lovelace dashboard.
How to install the OctoPrint card for Home Assistant
Please be aware that the OctoPrint card for Home Assistant is still in the alpha stage of development. As such, you won't be able to install this Lovelace card using HACS just yet. Despite its pleasing design and usefulness, it is also unlikely that this card will never become an officially supported card. That is because the Home Assistant developers don't accept cards tied to specific integrations, which is understandable because there are many cards that only serve one purpose.
Without any support for HACS, you will have to manually install the OctoPrint card for Home Assistant. Though this only includes adding a file to your Home Assistant's www folder and adding it to the resource section of Lovelace, you are responsible for checking the repository for updates. If you're patient, the presence of a file named [hacs.json](https://github.com/dangreco/threedy#method-2-manual) does indicate that it will be added to the community store sooner rather than later.
