Kiln 1.4.0 adds one page for the printer you own: the Monitor, at kiln3d.com/monitor. Open it in any browser and you are looking at your machine: the camera, the nozzle and bed temperatures, progress, the layer it is on, time remaining, and when it will be done. Pause, resume, and stop are on the same screen. It is free with a Kiln account.
Checking a running print used to mean walking over to the machine, or opening a different vendor app for every printer brand, each with its own account and its own idea of what to show you.
Not a progress bar. The object.
The Monitor can even show the actual thing you are printing, growing layer by layer, as a 3D model you can turn. A progress bar tells you 46%. The Monitor shows you 46% of what.
This works for prints Kiln sliced on your own machine. When a Monitor tab is actually watching, Kiln sends that sliced file up to your own Kiln account so the browser has something to draw. Nothing is sent when nobody is looking, only you can open it, and it costs nothing: watching your own print is not the same as making something, so it never touches an allowance. A job you started at the printer’s own screen has no file for Kiln to draw from, and the Monitor says so plainly instead of guessing.
The Monitor tells you the truth, even when the truth is boring
A dashboard is only worth having if you can trust what it says, so the Monitor is built to report what it actually knows:
- It names the machine it is watching, so two printers never blur into one page.
- A stale reading says so. If the numbers stopped arriving, the Monitor tells you how old they are instead of presenting them as live.
- A cancelled print reads as cancelled. The Monitor never congratulates you for a print ending that was stopped.
- A print that has stopped progressing gets flagged, instead of sitting there looking fine.
- Every state explains itself. Printer off? Bridge not running? Nothing paired yet? Each screen says what is happening and what to do next, instead of a spinner and a shrug.
And because the page reads your printer directly, leaving it open all evening spends nothing: no AI tokens, no allowance, no meter. There is no AI in the Monitor at all. When you want judgment rather than numbers, that is still your AI agent’s job, and it can watch the same print for you.
What it needs
A free Kiln account, and the Kiln bridge switched on. The bridge ships with Kiln and is opt-in and outbound-only: kiln bridge enable turns it on, and it is what links the computer beside your printer to your account. The camera feed appears where your printer has one Kiln can reach; everything else works either way.
More in the Kiln 1.4.0 release post, and the full detail is in the release notes. Kiln is an open-source MCP server: free at the core, AGPL-3.0, with paid tiers for deeper engineering features.