Keep history in order to equalize usage of all parts of bed

[jepler]

I use a Prusa and the coated spring steel sheets are considered consumables.

I've been thinking about how auto-arrange tends to place parts at the center of the printable area. This means a lot of wear occurs in the middle, and less around the edges. If this wear was distributed evenly over time, the bed might last longer.

To facilitate this, the slicer could keep track of how often each part of the bed is used, and when auto-arranging parts it could favor placing them on less-used parts of the bed.

Additionally, if you get a gouge or other defect in a particular sheet, it would be nice to mark it as "infinitely used" so that the slicer would not auto-arrange parts on top of the defect ever.

One problem with this idea is that orcaslicer knows what it has sliced and what it has exported but it doesn't know if you actually print a particular gcode file 0, 1, or 100 times. Ultimately this might need to be a feature that works in conjunction with the printer control like octoprint or klipper in order to have the best data.

I floated this general idea on my Mastodon account (which is by no means deeply plugged into the 3D printing world) and it garnered a modest amount of interest in the form of boosts & likes so I thought it might be worth bringing up here.