Camera Mount for Remote Print Monitoring

thingiverse

This design is intended to facilitate mounting a small USB camera (specifically a ELP-usb500w02m-l21) on a vertical surface, with a good degree of flexibility in orientation. I've specifically used this to mount one of these cameras (the 170 degree field of view version) inside my R2X. Once I had the orientation that I wanted, I fixed the ball-and-socket in place with glue. In the position shown in the photo, I get an excellent view of the nozzle as it extrudes, a nearly complete view of the build plate as it drops, and the carriage will not hit the camera/hood. The "hood" piece is optional and can be used to shield the lens from a light source. In my case I wanted to prevent the bright LEDs in the front of my R2X from impacting image quality. I've built a small raft into the hood piece to provide a starting point for supports; it is easily snapped off after printing. 12mm M2 screws can be used to attach the camera to the mount by simply screwing into the plastic (no need for nuts on the back). The bracket can be attached to the vertical surface using #10-32 machine screws or similar. A 3/16 inch drill bit can be used to ensure the holes in the mounting bracket are sized for the #10 screws. The camera output is processed using an ODROID camera and VLC. This allows the video stream to be viewed from another machine with VLC or similar over HTTP. A sample VLC command line that works for me is: /usr/bin/cvlc -I dummy --no-interact \ v4l2:///dev/video0 :v4l2-standard= :live-caching=60 \ :sout="#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=512,scale=1,fps=5,acodec=none} \ :http{mux=ts,dst=:8080/cam}" > /dev/null & I'll be honest that working with VLC can be maddening for me, so please do not ask me to help debug :). Good luck! Print Settings Rafts: No Supports: Yes