I run my 3D printer from Home Assistant now — and it’s surprisingly useful

Modern 3D printers are a lot more versatile than what you'd have found even a few years ago. You can control them remotely, use on-board cameras to monitor prints or record timelapses, and even send prints via your phone if you need something printed by the time you get home.

But considering Bambu Lab just pulled the HP printer playbook on 3D printing, I was looking for alternate ways to control my 3D printer. What I discovered has opened up more ways to control my 3D printer than I could ever imagine, and now it talks to the rest of my smart house too.

Your 3D printer belongs in your smart home

Connecting your 3D printer to Home Assistant takes only a few minutes

Before you start sending commands to your 3D printer from Home Assistant, you'll need to install some extras. First comes HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) — a community-run third-party store for Home Assistant that offers additional features and integrations that add a lot more capability you won't find in a stock Home Assistant installation.

I use a Bambu Lab printer, so the integration I downloaded was ha-bambulab. All you need to do is add greghesp/ha-bambulab as a custom repository under the Integrations category, download it, and restart Home Assistant. After that, you can add the Bambu Lab integration via the Devices & Services menu on Home Assistant, select your printer model, and you're off to the races.

The integration asks you to choose whether you want to connect to your printer over LAN or the Bambu Cloud. LAN mode, as the name suggests, connects directly to the printer on your local network using the printer's IP address, serial number, and LAN access code — all found in the printer's settings menu. If you care about local control and privacy, this is the better option. However, the cloud mode is easier to set up (you just need to log in with your Bambu account) and works just as well.

Apart from Bambu Lab, you've got other integrations like OctoPrint (standard for interfacing with legacy or custom-built printers), Moonraker for Klipper firmware, Creality, FlashForge, and Elegoo for all sorts of different printers.

The amount of data is almost overwhelming

Temperatures, print progress, power usage, and dozens of entities ready for automation

Once the integration is running, Home Assistant will see tons of entities from your 3D printer. The integration exposes a detailed snapshot of everything your printer knows about itself. You get temperature sensors for the nozzle and print bed (with their target values), print progress as a percentage, current layer versus total layer count, remaining time, estimated end time, camera feed, and print status. There are also diagnostic entities like Wi-Fi signal strength, SD card status, whether a firmware update is available, and any error codes the printer might report.

You also get a handful of useful controls. In the case of my Bambu Lab A1 Mini, I can toggle the chamber light and pause, resume, or stop an active print from my Home Assistant dashboard. If you've got the AMS (Automatic Material System) attached, each tray's filament type, color, and remaining amount also shows up as an individual entity.

The amount of entities and control you get will vary based on your printer's make and model. You will also have to add these manually to your Home Assistant dashboard before they can be useful. That said, once my Home Assistant dashboard was as smart as the rest of my house, monitoring and controlling my 3D printer became a breeze without ever having to interact with the Bambu software and in some cases, even the printer itself.

A dashboard you'll actually keep open

Bringing print status, camera feeds, and controls together in one clean interface

As mentioned before, a plain list of entities might give you information, but it isn't easy to access, not to mention not every interesting to look at. Building a dedicated Lovelace dashboard for your printer is totally worth the effort here.

The community has made this easier with a few tools at your disposal. WolfWithSwords YAML configurator, for example, generates dashboard YAML that gives you a graphical card showing printer status, AMS spool colors for Bambu Lab printers, and temperature gauges — all tailored to your specific printer's entity names.

Even if you don't want to spend hours tweaking YAML to get that perfect dashboard, a simple one with a progress bar, nozzle temperature gauge, remaining time, and camera feed can give you an at-a-glance view that's more useful than the Handy app's notification-only approach. Pair it with a dedicated Home Assistant dashboard made from an old phone or tablet, and you've got a print monitor that's always on and visible.

This is where Home Assistant gets clever

Notifications, lighting, and automations that make printing far more convenient

Once your printer is talking to Home Assistant, it opens up paths to tons of automations that just weren't possible with Bambu Studio or the Bambu Handy app. Home Assistant lets you build conditional, multi-step automations that react ot any state the printer exposes.

For example, I've faced problems with the Bambu Handy app's print notifications. Sometimes, they appear right when a print is done, and at others, they'll take ages to appear. Even if you get an instant notification that your print is done, it's not very useful, as you have to wait for the print bed to cool down before taking your part off to avoid warping or bending.

With Home Assistant, I can set up a notification that checks the print status, and if it's done, checks the print bed temperature. I only get the notification that my print is ready to be taken off when the print bed has cooled down, and the print is ready to be pulled off.

And that's not all. If you've got an air purifier and have the printer set up in your home office, you can ask Home Assistant to turn it on automatically when a print starts and keep it running for some time afterwards so you can reduce exposure to any harmful fumes. You can have a photo from the printer's camera sent to your phone after the first layer is done to check bed adhesion, have your lights flash a specific color when the print completes, or an error is reported, and much more.

Treat it like any other smart appliance

Once connected, your printer becomes another intelligent part of your home ecosystem

The integrations aren't without their quirks. For the Bambu Lab integration specifically, using cloud mode can sometimes generate a high number of state change events, putting unnecessary load on your Home Assistant event bus. Running in LAN mode largely avoids this issue. The connections can drop sometimes, and if you're building a particularly complex dashboard with custom UI elements, setting it all up can be a bit of a chore.

But at the end of the day, none of this is a dealbreaker. The integrations are actively maintained and frequently updated with new features and bug fixes. More importantly, it lets your printer interact with your smart home in a manner that simply isn't possible with the software that came with it, and that can open up more avenues of control than you can even imagine.