New to lasers and 3d printing.
I was wondering if anyone has a Google sheet/excel/etc template for logging their projects that the use and would be willing to share as a template for me to use.
When working in the woodshop I often use scraps of paper that then EVENTUALLY get turned in to something more maintainable if the project turned out well.
Project management for 3d printing sucks. The closest I get is using git and text files, including OpenSCAD models and STL outputs, but thats just because I’m familiar. Most things start as a physical sketch in my notebook. 3d print settings sometimes live in a 3mf file, but only really for the last part I printed using those settings - 3mfs (for prusa at least) don’t really support multiple build plates or varying settings or material by parts of a project.
I very much hope that someone open sources something around this. 3mf files are just renamed zip files, so it could be an easy addition to the format.
All this to say - I do this a lot and I haven’t solved it, so I’d love to hear other answers.
Jira is very decent for managing most projects.
Hey @b.a.gladden, good to see you here 
I’ve been noticing lately that Google Sheets has some new fangled pre-built tables that seem like pretty decent starting points to customize for stuff, but I think this also depends on what all info you’re wanting to store about your projects.
If the limitations of an excel sheet don’t bother you, then tweaking one of these tables might be the simplest solution.
Asmbly uses Basecamp for project mgmt (with a free educational account), but it’s not a free solution and if your end goal is to have a single pane view of all your projects, then it’s probably not a great fit. Jira is great for software development (as you know), but I wouldn’t say it’s great for this use case (I very briefly tried introducing Jira to Asmbly for backend operations and it was immediately clear it would not be a good fit and was overly complicated for most users).
Interested to see what you end up with on this!
Yes, I was just hoping to NOT have to build one out in g-sheets, hoping someone had already done the work.
I will use GIT for tracking changes to the files (the good and the bad). But right now I’m using a simple pad-o-paper method for tracking settings used on Dorian, the project, and the wood (or scrap) I am using.
I will likely work out something more interesting while on a plane at some point.
Makes sense, I think the difficulty is that info people want to track can vary, especially depending on the shop areas they work in. What exactly are you wanting to track? You mentioned laser projects, so are you talking specifically about something to track laser projects with columns for machines, materials, and settings? It’s really simple tweaking the table templates to exactly what’s relevant to you, here’s an example of a quick one I made in 5 min from the one screenshoted above.
