Articles on: SimplyPrint features

Watching a print from your phone

Watching a print from your phone


The SimplyPrint app puts a live camera, current job progress, and full pause / resume / cancel controls on your phone. This guide covers what you see when you open a printer in the app, what each control does, and what to do when something looks off.


The app and the web panel share one source of truth. Whatever you can see and do on simplyprint.io for a print job, you can see and do on the phone.


Table of contents

  • Open a printer
  • The live camera tile
  • Temperatures
  • Progress, ETA, and current layer
  • Pause, resume, cancel
  • Clearing the bed
  • Multi-printer view
  • AI overlay during a print
  • Watching across multiple printers (Pro+)
  • What needs the web panel
  • Connection requirements
  • Troubleshooting the camera
  • Related articles


Open a printer

On the app's home screen, every printer your account has access to is listed. Tap a printer to open its detail screen.


The list shows live status badges, so a quick glance tells you which printers are idle, printing, paused, errored, or offline. Tap once to drill in.


Group your printers in the web panel (Printers > Groups) and the same grouping shows up in the app. On a print farm or school lab with a lot of machines, this is how you avoid scrolling through dozens of cards.


The live camera tile

If the printer has a camera connected through the SimplyPrint bridge (Rasperry Pi / OctoPrint / Klipper / etc.), the camera tile shows a live MJPEG-style stream of the bed.


  • Tap to zoom: pinch in and out on the camera tile.
  • Rotate to landscape: full-screen camera view, useful for inspecting a layer.
  • Tap the fullscreen icon: enlarges the camera to fill the screen with the controls overlaid.


The stream rate matches your plan's stream speed. Free has a slower refresh; paid plans get a smoother feed.


Temperatures

Below or beside the camera, the app shows live temperatures for:


  • Hotend (nozzle) - current and target
  • Bed - current and target
  • Chamber (if your printer reports it)


The values update in real time from the printer's firmware via the bridge. Tap a temperature to see a small chart of the last few minutes if your printer supports it.


Progress, ETA, and current layer

The progress section shows:


  • Print job file name
  • Percentage complete
  • Time elapsed and time remaining (ETA)
  • Current layer / total layers (if the file reports it)
  • Filament used so far


ETA is computed from the slicer's estimate plus the live print rate, so it gets more accurate as the print progresses.


Pause, resume, cancel

The control row right below the camera has three primary buttons:


  • Pause - sends the firmware pause command. Movement stops, temperatures hold, the nozzle parks (printer-dependent).
  • Resume - resumes a paused job. The nozzle returns to the print and continues from where it stopped.
  • Cancel - ends the job immediately. Use this when you've seen a failure that won't recover.


Cancel asks for confirmation before firing. Pause and resume are single-tap.


Cancelling is final. The job cannot be resumed once cancelled - you'd need to restart from the queue or the file.


Clearing the bed

After a print finishes, the bed needs to be cleared before the next job can start. The app has a Clear bed button that:


  1. Marks the previous job as completed in the system.
  2. Optionally moves the printer to a homing position.
  3. Frees the printer to receive the next job from the queue.


For AutoPrint hardware (the conveyor / belt / arm models), clearing the bed is automatic; the button is hidden in those cases.


Multi-printer view

If you have multiple printers, the home screen is your control tower. Each card shows a thumbnail, current job, progress, and status badge. Tap a card to drill in, or use the filter / sort controls at the top to narrow the list.


On Pro and above, multi-stream lets you watch several cameras at once in a grid. This is mostly a web-panel feature, but the app's printer list with thumbnail previews is the mobile equivalent.


AI overlay during a print

If AI Failure Detection is running on the print, the camera tile shows a translucent overlay marking where the model thinks there's a problem. The confidence gauge shows how sure the model is.


If the model crosses the alert threshold, the app sends a push (see Push notifications from SimplyPrint to your phone) with a snapshot of the camera and a one-tap Pause button right in the notification.


AI Failure Detection runs minutes against your account's monthly AI quota. See The SimplyPrint AI Failure Detection feature for how the quota works.


Watching across multiple printers (Pro+)

On Pro and above, SimplyPrint includes multi-stream tiles and multi-printer controls (multi-pause, multi-resume, multi-cancel, multi-clear-bed). The phone app surfaces these as bulk actions when you select more than one printer from the list.


Free and Basic plans see one printer at a time without bulk actions; the per-printer controls are the same.


What needs the web panel

A few things are still web-only:


  • Slicing files in the cloud slicer
  • Editing per-printer settings (camera URL, gcode hooks, firmware-specific options)
  • Building the print queue from scratch
  • Setting up a new printer


The app intentionally doesn't try to be a full panel - it's the monitor-and-control surface.


Connection requirements

Live cameras need:


  • A camera physically connected to the printer's bridge (Pi / OctoPrint / Klipper / SimplyPrint-OS / etc.)
  • The bridge online and communicating with the SimplyPrint cloud
  • Your phone has internet


If the camera tile shows "No stream" or a still image, the camera is either not connected, configured to a different URL, or the bridge is offline. Confirm the bridge status in the web panel first.


Troubleshooting the camera

  • No camera at all: the printer doesn't have one connected via the bridge. Add one to the bridge first.
  • Black screen / spinner: the bridge is online but the stream URL isn't reaching the cloud. See Klipper webcam not detected for Klipper-specific fixes.
  • Frozen frame: the stream stalled. Pull-to-refresh the printer screen.
  • Stream is choppy: the printer's network is slow. The stream is uncompressed-ish MJPEG; weak Wi-Fi will struggle.
  • The bed is on the camera but I can't tap Pause: the printer is connected but not currently printing - Pause only works during an active job.


If everything looks right in the app but wrong on the printer side, open the printer in the web panel; the same diagnostics will be there with more detail.



Updated on: 25/05/2026

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