Automating production of 3D printed parts with gcode manipulation

The world of 3D printing has opened up so many possibilities, it honestly can change the way you approach a problem. These tools have made incredible advances in the past few years and are ubiquitous in industrial and manufacturing settings. However, one issue I faced was that as it became popular to have small parts created for production aids and other tools, I was spending so much time managing these printers and parts. So I dug into the gcode that controls these printers and found out it was actually fairly easy to manipulate the code the control and automate the production for me! With a few hours of research and experimenting, I was able to add some custom commands so the printer will wait for the print bed to cool down enough that the parts delaminate, then use the print head itself to push the parts into a bin. With this setup, instead of trying to maximize parts on the print bed (and risking defects from parts near the edges), I can run this overnight and worry free!