Articles on: Managing your printers

Display Screens (the Print Farm Screen): live printer status walls

Display Screens turn any TV, monitor, or touchscreen into a live, auto-updating wall of your printers, with no one logged in. Many people call it the Print Farm Screen, because that's the classic setup: a screen on the shop floor showing every machine at a glance. This guide covers the whole feature - what a screen is, the screen types you can choose, reusable templates, the new SimplyPrint Display OS image for Raspberry Pi, and the setup-code pairing that gets a screen running without typing a long link.

Display Screens is currently in a private beta and is not yet generally available. If you'd like to try it on your account, email contact@simplyprint.io to request access to the beta.

Display Screens is part of the Print Farm plan, and is included on the School and Enterprise plans. See the pricing page for a full plan comparison.

How display screens work

A display screen is a read-only page that shows a selected set of your printers and refreshes on its own in real time as printers change state. You show it on whatever you want to use as the wall: a Raspberry Pi behind a touchscreen, a smart TV's browser, or a spare monitor on a mini PC. Once it's up, you can leave it running unattended.

The screen never logs in to SimplyPrint. Each screen has its own private link (it lives at simplyprint.io/display/ followed by a unique key), and that key is what authenticates the wall, so there's no account or password sitting on a public-facing device. You don't have to handle that link by hand though - the easiest way to get a screen running is the SimplyPrint Display OS image and a short setup code, covered below.

Creating a display screen

You manage screens from your account settings.

Go to Settings and open Display Screens.
Click Create display screen.
Give the screen an internal name. This is just for you, to tell your screens apart in the list. It isn't shown on the wall.
Choose a screen type (see the next section).
Choose what the screen shows. You can pick individual printers, whole printer groups, printer models, or a combination. Selecting a group keeps the screen current automatically as printers move in and out of that group.
Optionally add an IP allowlist. There's a helper that fills in your current public IP for you, so you don't have to look it up.
Save.

Leave Put in setup mode after creating ticked (it's on by default) and you'll get a pairing code the moment the screen is created, ready to type into your device.

Screen types

A screen can be one of four types. Pick the one that fits where the screen will live.

Type	What it shows	Best for
Printer Group Simple	A compact, glanceable grid of printer tiles with status and progress	A farm wall or lab board where you want to see every machine at once
Printer cards	Larger per-printer cards with more detail, such as a camera snapshot, temperatures, current layer, and job name	A smaller wall or a focused area where you want richer detail per printer
Control panel (single printer)	A full control view for one printer, optionally with its camera	A screen mounted next to a single machine
Spotlight (rotating showcase)	Rotates through your printers one at a time, full screen, on a timer	A lobby or showcase display

Each type has its own settings panel in the editor. The most common type, Printer Group Simple, is detailed below; the others follow the same idea with options that suit their layout.

Customizing the Printer Group Simple wall

The Printer Group Simple type is a clean grid of printer tiles, sized to your wall. You control what each tile shows and how the grid behaves.

Title and layout

Screen title - a heading shown in the corner of the wall. You can type your own, or turn on auto-title from the group to use the selected group's name automatically.
Fit all on screen - sizes every printer tile to fit the viewport without scrolling, no matter how many printers are on the wall. You can also set a fixed number of grid columns and rows if you want a specific arrangement.

Per-tile information

Toggle which details appear on each printer tile:

printer status
job name
progress percentage
finish time
nozzle size
maintenance-needed indicator
AutoPrint icon (shown when AutoPrint is enabled on that printer)

QR codes

a single QR code for the group, and/or
a QR code on each printer tile

Sorting

Choose the sort order and direction so printers appear on the wall in the arrangement you want.

Custom field values

If your print jobs use custom fields, you can show selected custom field values right on the printer tile, for example a job number or customer reference.

Printer detail popup

Long-pressing a printer on the wall opens a popup for that printer with a print history tab and an order tab, handy if someone walks up to the wall and wants a closer look without opening the panel.

On-screen actions

A display screen can optionally let people act on printers directly from the wall, with no login. Because the wall has no signed-in user, every action is off by default and has to be turned on deliberately per screen.

On-screen actions are off by default and are security-gated. Only enable the ones you need, and remember that anyone who can see and touch the screen can use whatever you turn on. The riskiest action (starting prints on every printer in the account) additionally requires an IP allowlist before it can be enabled.

The available actions are:

Clear bed - mark a printer's bed as cleared from the wall.
Restart / reprint last job - re-run the printer's last job. You can optionally have it clear the bed first.
Refresh / sync spools - resync a printer's loaded spools.
One-click print (this screen's printers) - start the next queued job on the printers shown on this screen.
One-click print (all printers) - start the next queued job across every printer in your account. This is the highest-risk option, so it can only be turned on when the screen also has a non-empty IP allowlist.

Templates: set it once, apply it everywhere

Templates are the fastest way to keep many screens consistent. Instead of configuring each wall by hand, you save a set of display settings once as a template and apply it to as many screens as you like.

The payoff is live updates. When you edit a template, every screen linked to it updates immediately. Connected walls refresh on their own within seconds, so you never have to walk around reloading TVs after a settings change.

SimplyPrint provides a few starter templates to get you going:

Print-farm wall
Classroom board
Minimal status board

Starter templates are read-only, so you duplicate one to create your own editable copy. Duplicating opens the template editor pre-filled with a copy of the settings, and the copy is only created when you save it. You can also build a template from scratch.

Each screen is in one of two states:

Custom - the screen has its own settings, independent of any template.
Linked to a template - the screen inherits the template's settings live. Those settings are read-only on the screen itself until you detach it from the template, at which point it becomes custom again and keeps its current settings.

Linking your walls to one template is the easiest way to keep a large farm or a multi-room lab consistent. Change the template once and every screen follows.

Putting a screen on a device

There are two ways to get a screen running on a physical display.

New to the hardware side? See Display Screen hardware setup: tablet, TV, or Raspberry Pi kiosk for a full A-Z walkthrough, including which Raspberry Pi to pick and how to flash it with Raspberry Pi Imager.

SimplyPrint Display OS (recommended)

SimplyPrint Display OS is a ready-made Raspberry Pi image, the easiest way to turn a Raspberry Pi and a touchscreen into a dedicated wall display. It boots straight into the display, with nothing to install or configure on the printer side.

Request the SimplyPrint Display OS image (it's part of the beta - email contact@simplyprint.io).
Flash the image to a microSD card with a tool like Raspberry Pi Imager or balenaEtcher.
Set your Wi-Fi network when prompted. You can change the Wi-Fi later from the device itself, so it's easy to move a screen between rooms or sites.
Connect a touchscreen (or any monitor) and power on the Pi. It boots into a setup screen, ready to pair.
Pair it to a screen with a setup code (below).

Pairing with a setup code

Typing a long link on a touchscreen is painful, so setup mode skips it. You enter a short code instead.

In Settings > Display Screens, find the screen in the list and choose Set up device. (If you ticked Put in setup mode after creating when creating the screen, the code is already waiting for you.)
You'll get a short setup code, valid for about an hour.
On the device, type in the code.
The device shows you the screen's details (its name and the printers it covers) and asks you to confirm.
Confirm, and the device switches to showing that screen. That's it - no long link to type.

Setup codes are single-use and expire after about an hour. If a code expires before you pair, or you want a fresh one, choose Set up device again. You can also cancel setup mode to invalidate a code immediately.

Or use any browser

If you'd rather use a smart TV, a mini PC, or a tablet, you can skip the Pi. Each screen's row in Settings > Display Screens has its private display link, with buttons to copy it or open a live preview. Open that link in any browser and put it in full-screen or kiosk mode.

Keeping screens secure

Because the screen's key is its credential, you can lock things down:

IP allowlist - restrict a screen so it only loads from specific networks, for example your shop floor's public IP. Connections from anywhere else are turned away.
Rotate key - generate a fresh key whenever you need to. The old link stops working immediately, which is the fastest way to revoke a screen that was shared too widely or shown on a device you no longer control. Rotating the key also cancels any active setup code for that screen.

Updated on: 26/06/2026

Was this article helpful?

Thank you!