Collecting Prints

The Pickup page has two halves: everything still waiting on the left, and two buttons on the right: Scan to collect and Bin check. Those open the two jobs done with a scanner in your hand. Both are there. Which of them you see depends on your own permissions, not on how pickup is set up: handing prints over and auditing the shelves are two jobs the same people do, and doing one does not stop you doing the other.

Each opens as a window of its own, because neither is something you glance at: one is ten minutes at a counter with a queue in front of you, the other is twenty minutes away from the desk. While one is open it takes the keyboard: whatever you scan or type goes into it, with no need to click into a box first. Closing it puts you back on the list exactly where you were.

Putting a print away#

At a station by the machines, confirming a successful print asks what happens next:

• Put away assigns the print to a bin, prints its label, and records it as ready to collect.
• Hand over records it as collected without assigning a bin or printing a label.

Both choices complete the print job. The button captions show the label and pickup result before anything is recorded.

On the Printers page in the console, the bin appears after the outcome is confirmed:

Put it here B-04 Second shelf, by the door

The console offers three follow-up answers:

• Put away records the print as being in that bin. It is now ready to collect, and it is what a bin check expects to find there.
• Give it straight to its owner is for the print that is never going to the shelves at all, they are standing right there when it comes off the machine. It records the collection, notes that the print went straight over without being shelved, and frees the bin it was heading for. Offered only while the print has not already been put away, because after that it is an ordinary collection off a shelf.
• Not yet leaves it as not put away: the honest answer for a part still on the build plate, or one somebody is carrying off to cool. It stays at the top of the Pickup page until somebody puts it away.

No console answer is required, and none of them loses the print. Each answer needs its own permission: confirm a finished print is in its bin and hand a print over, or the matching capability on a station’s template, so a screen that is only there to clear printers shows the bin without offering to claim anything happened to it.

If your deployment is set to assume prints are put away (Settings → Pickup handling), the print is already recorded as being in its bin by the time this appears, so there is nothing left to confirm and Put away is not offered. Handing it straight over still is.

With a scanner#

Handheld barcode scanners work as keyboards. They type the code and press Enter. Nothing needs to be plugged in or configured, and you do not need to click into a box first.

1. Open Pickup and press Scan to collect.
2. Scan the label on the box. You do not need to click anywhere first: the window is already listening.
3. Check the name and the print that come up.
4. Press Hand it over.
5. Scan the next one. The window keeps a tally of what has gone out while you have been standing there, so you can see the last few without leaving it.

From the keyboard#

The window is built to be used without a mouse, because the hand that would hold one is holding a box:

Key	Does
↵	Looks up whatever is in the box, which is what the scanner presses for you
↵	Hands the print over, once one is on screen
Esc	Sends the print on screen away and goes back to scanning
Esc	Closes the window, when nothing is on screen

Every shortcut is shown on the control it fires, so there is nothing to memorise.

Enter will not hand a print over the instant one appears. It arms a moment later, and the ↵ on the button fades in as it does. That pause is deliberate: a scanner presses Enter itself at the end of every read, so a shortcut that were live immediately would be pressed by the scan rather than by you: before you had read the name.

A scan never hands anything over on its own. It shows you what it found and waits for you to confirm, because a mis-scan is an ordinary event: a courier label on the box, a neighbouring label, a double read, and handing somebody the wrong print cannot be undone by software. While a print is on screen waiting for you, the window stops listening and says so, so that a second scan landing behind your back cannot answer the question for you.

A scanner at the shelves, doing both directions#

If your scanner lives by the bins rather than at a desk, set that screen up as a pickup station granted both hand over and put away. One scan then does whichever is right: a print that is not on a shelf is going on, and a print that is on a shelf is coming off. Putting one away happens the moment you scan it; handing one over still stops and shows you the name.

Without a scanner#

Everything works with a mouse.

• Look up a code by hand. Open Scan to collect and type it in: the same box, and the same window; there is no separate mode for it. The code is printed under the barcode on the label, and shown on the print’s own panel so you can read it out over the phone.
• Find it in the list. Search by the person’s name, the print’s name, or the code. Open it and press Mark collected. This always works: somebody who turns up at the office instead of the shelf still gets their print, and it is recorded against whoever handed it over. A print that never reached a shelf also offers Handed straight to owner, which records the same collection and says the print skipped the bins.

The list#

Everything still waiting, grouped by bin, because the question people actually ask is where is it, not when did it finish.

• Not put away comes first. Under most settings that means the print has nowhere to go and somebody needs to do something about it.
• Overdue only narrows the list to prints past their collection deadline.
• Each print shows how many days overdue it is, once it is.
• The list shows what is still waiting by default. Switch it to Collected to find a print somebody has already taken: “I handed that over an hour ago, where is the record?”, or to Everything for the lot, including prints that were disposed of or written off.
• A long list shows the oldest first and says how many there are in total. Search by name, by person, or by the code on the label: the whole code, prefix and all, is fine.

What else you can do to a print#

Open any print in the list.

• Confirm it is on the shelf. You have seen it where it is supposed to be. Offered only when it means something: a print already recorded as on the shelf does not need confirming, and one that has been collected or disposed of shows what happened to it instead of a row of buttons that would be refused.

• Move it to another bin: including out of a bin entirely.

• Give another week: pushes the collection deadline out, counted from today.

• Change the status to missing, abandoned, disposed of, or nothing to collect. Each asks for a reason, and the reason is kept on the print’s history.

  Disposed of and nothing to collect are deliberately different. Disposal means there was a print and it has been thrown away. That counts as waste nobody collected. Nothing to collect means there was never a physical object worth keeping, so it stops the tracking without putting the print into your uncollected-waste figures.

Every one of these is a separate permission, so you can let counter staff hand prints over without letting them declare somebody’s work abandoned.

What the person who printed it sees#

A print job’s own page shows a Collection section to the person who submitted it, without giving them any view of anybody else’s prints. It says where the print is, its pickup code, when it needs collecting by, and when it was put away or collected.

That is the whole point of tracking finished prints: “where is my print?” is a question somebody should be able to answer without walking to a counter and asking. Staff holding view pickup items see the same section on every job.

The same Collection section appears on a station, in the print job details a person opens from the queue, the history, or a printer, so the answer is on the screen that is already in front of them rather than one room away. A station shows it when your deployment runs pickup and that screen’s template grants view pickup items; a queue board that has not been granted it carries on showing nothing about who is collecting what, which is what makes such a board safe on a corridor wall. It shows the bin, the pickup code, the collection deadline, and when the print was put away or collected, and only for prints the station can reach: its own site’s, and anything on a shelf it shares.

History#

Every print keeps its own history: when it finished, when it got a bin, when it was put away, who collected it, and anything a rule did to it. It is separate from the print job’s own history, which is about how the thing was made rather than what happened to it afterwards.