Status Display Keeps Eye on Your Prusa Fleet

Whether you’ve been dragging an old MK2 or MK3 kicking and screaming into the present through the available upgrade paths, or recently picked up a CORE One, pretty much any of the 3D printers still being actively supported by Prusa are able to connect to the network for the purposes of remote monitoring and control. Although their printers can work entirely offline, Prusa offers a smartphone application as well as web interface that makes it easy to keep tabs on all the hot plastic action.

If you’ve got a few Prusa printers on the net and would like a dedicated interface for controlling them, check out this custom firmware for the BigTreeTech K-Touch and Panda Touch devices. These touch screen gadgets were originally intended for controlling printers running Klipper, but thanks to [Nomads Galaxy], they can now talk to Prusa printers either directly over the local network or through the Prusa Connect cloud API with a user interface that mimics the aesthetics of the official offerings.

As an added bonus, the new firmware still retains the ability to talk to Klipper printers and cloud-connected units from Bambu Labs. Though for the latter it looks like the setup is a bit more convoluted, and there’s always a chance that these unofficial projects could break if Bambu decides to really start playing dirty.

The project is entirely open source, and ready to flash binary images are available to install via several methods. Incidentally the two supported displays are apparently using the ESP32 under hood, so they could be useful toys for all sorts of applications outside the 3D printing realm.

We took a look at one of the aftermarket 3D printer controllers from BigTreeTech back in 2022, but it would appear fair to say that the state of the art has advanced considerably since then.