Camera Mount

This first description is obsolete, see the new mount farther down the page.

Having gotten Repetier Server working, I obviously had to enable the webcam feature :-). That means I needed a way to mount a webcam to watch prints in progress:

That's a fairly small Logitech C920S (which for some reason was cheaper than the identical one without the 'S') mounted on a printed platform with a 1/4-20 bolt. The platform has angled holes to clamp to some pieces of dowel:

The top ends of the dowels are clamped to a couple of little pieces that fit under the lip of the t-slot rail so the weight of the camera mount holds them in place:

You can see the odd shape that fits into the rail here:

I'm running mjpg-streamer on the computer, so I can see the progress anywhere on my local network. I should also be able to record the stream and make time lapse videos, but that's a project for another day.

Almost forgot, here's the view from the camera:

I experimented and found that I could change the config file to higher resolution than 640x480, but I don't need as much bandwidth and I see most of the printbed at 640x480, so I'll probably leave it there.

It is another day, and I've been experimenting with ffmpeg commands and finally found one that makes a timelapse directly from the mjpg-streamer stream:

ffmpeg -f mjpeg -i 'http://zino:8080/?action=stream' -filter:v "setpts=0.1*PTS" -an -r 30 -vcodec libx264 -crf 0 -preset ultrafast -threads 0 timelapse.mkv

The camera view (above) has now been replaced with the timelapse this created while building a rather boring single wall cube. The delays at the start are for the bed and hot end to heat up before it starts printing.

...

Time passed, and the original camera mount broke (probably because the parts were too thin and got lots of vibration during prints). So I replaced it with a massive new mount printed as a single piece which just supports the platform for the camera on one side, but with a very thick arm that fits into the t-slot the same way as the old mount:

I've also started using OctoPrint and Cura rather than Repetier Server. So I don't need to run funny commands to make time lapse videos since OctoPrint can do it for me.