Charging through fabman

[raphael]

Hi @lucalab and welcome!

That’s a lot of questions. I’ll do my best…

@lucalab

I was wondering whether there might be room for advanced charging options like materials that could be added to a users account, amount of filament used by a 3d printer,…

There are a few options:

1. You can manually charge members for pretty much anything by going to their detail page, selecting “Charges & invoices” and clicking on “Add a charge or credit”.

2. Some labs use an automated, two-step approach for charging for filament:

   1. Extract information from your 3D printer about the amount of material used and store it in the metadata field of the corresponding activity via our API.
   2. Use a webhook to get notified when an activity is created or updated and automatically generate a charge for the member via our API based on the information in the metadata field.

This approach allows you to automatically charge people however you like, but it requires some programming. @roland has documented how Happylab does it for their Formlabs printers and I think they have something similar for their Stratasys printers. @walterw tried a similar approach for their Ultimaker printers and @mzuzelka experimented with getting that information from Prusa printers, if I remember correctly. Maybe these guys can tell you more.

@lucalab

Will stripe remain the only way to create a payment platform or will there be other options in the (near) future? Or is there a way to do this through an api?

There will be other options in the (near) future. In particular, we plan to allow members to pay directly via the member portal using common payment methods rather soon.

@lucalab

How does a usage report look like? How to create one and what data can be shown in such a report?

Fabman keeps all booking and usage data for as long as you’ve chosen in your account settings. At the moment yon can browse this data in Fabman

• as part of the overview visualization and
• as lists you can filter.

If you want to analyze the data in more detail, you can export it by member, machine, date range, etc. as CSV file and visualize it using your favorite spreadsheet program.

@lucalab

We currently use mifare + cards for our staff and students, will there be an option to batch import all these users from an Active Directory export?

Not via the application, but if you know a little bit of programming, you can use our open Fabman API to create members and assign them key cards in batch. Let me know if you need more information about that.

@lucalab

Is there a way to create a payment system where a member has an amount of money on his/her student card?

We don’t store any data on the cards, but you can use Fabman as a prepaid system by enabling “Require upfront payment” for these student members. Their available amount is not stored on their card, instead it’s linked to their member account. See our related help article for details.

I hope that helps.
Raphael