Focus Ring for Low Cost WebCam

thingiverse

I bought an inexpensive (about $20 USD) Web Cam off of Amazon and was delighted at the high quality images and plug-n-play ease getting it working on my Win 10 computer. Everything worked great but I found it difficult to adjust the focus. It turns out that the silver lens holder only protrudes from the front surface of the camera by 2mm and this makes it hard to grab and adjust. To solve this problem, I came up with this simple FOCUS RING attachment to make focus adjustment a snap! The new focus ring simply "press-fits/slips-on" the 2 mm silver lens holder of the camera and provides an easy "grab-n-focus" operation. Because the new FOCUS RING protrudes farther from the front surface of the camera, the privacy cover that came with the camera no longer works. So, I also came up with a simple LENS COVER that keeps the lens clean and assures privacy when not using the camera. Although this enhancement was designed to mate with my specific (yet common) style of camera, it should work with others. I have provided a dimensioned drawing of the camera so that you can compare it to your model. You should especially, compare the outer diameter of your camera's lens holder to that of my camera and FOCUS RING drawings to see if it is close and will fit. You should be able to scale the FOCUS RING.STL file in X & Y prior to slicing as needed to get the FOCUS RING diameter just right for your camera. Due to variances in printer performance, even if you have the exact same camera as I show, you may still need to do a little scaling to get the fit just right, not too tight (too hard to get on) and not too loose (falls off/easily detaches). For a capturing all of the detail and achieving a tight fit to the camera, I recommend using PLA printing at a layer height of 0.1 mm,100% infill. My prints (using a 0.4 mm nozzle) yielded good form, fit, and function, and even at .1 layer height, do not take long to complete. Note that it may take a couple of passes printing the FOCUS RING (adjusting scaling each time) to get the precision fit is needed to match the lens holder of your camera.