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Open protocol research · Chestnut Labs

Every printer speaks a different dialect. We wrote them down.

Implementation-grade white papers on the LAN control protocols of consumer 3D printers — clean-room, confidence-graded, vendor-neutral. Skip the reverse-engineering; start from documented facts.

Find your printer Comparison matrix

11protocol families
4cross-cutting patterns
2hardware-validated benches
MIT+ CC BY 4.0

The orchard

One white paper per printer family — transport, discovery, auth, control, feeders, quirks.

Anycubic Proprietary LAN Bambu Lab Proprietary LAN Creality Proprietary LAN Duet / RRF Object-model Elegoo Mixed · 3 stacks FlashForge Proprietary LAN Klipper / Moonraker Moonraker Marlin (USB) USB serial OctoPrint Host controller PrusaLink Host controller Snapmaker U1 Moonraker + wrapper Your printer?METHOD.md shows how to research it — PRs welcome.
01Mined from first-party sourceNearly every vendor ships an open-source slicer fork — its device code is the authoritative client.
02Clean-room, facts onlyUncopyrightable interface facts plus sanitized wire captures — never copied code, never credentials.
03Confidence-gradedEvery fact carries a tag — trust accordingly, and see exactly which capture would close a gap.
Every fact is tagged hardware-validated source-read community / RE inferred
Close a gap Hardware-validated captures that promote a source-read fact are the highest-value contribution.