YACE - Yet Another Cam Enclosure

thingiverse

This is an enclosure for a raspberry cam together with an led ring mounted on top. It was designed to fit to the Rear Column vertical 2020 extrusion but will fit into other mounts to sit at the x-axis or the front. The enclosure has quite a few parts, on the bottom part of the case comes the piCam breakout, a gap filler evens the surface, then the ring holder. These 4 layers get fixed with 2 m2x10 screws. Then the led ring is place on the ring, turn it until the three input wires point straight south. The top of the case hase an opening for those. Three m2x14 screws keep top and bottom of the case snuggly together. The case has an handle that fits to bracket of Codemonkey's www.thingiverse.com/thing:3294512 or derivatives with an m3 screw. Besides there are two versions of clips that go on a 2020 extrusion (based on https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1052397) and 2 short arms with crossed or straight handles. The led ring I designed this for has 8 leds in a close formation. The outer edge has a diameter of 27mm wile the opening has 12. Simply choosing an 8-led-ring may give you a different size, I used: (https://de.aliexpress.com/item/32963910770.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.27424c4dITplEY) FreeCad source is included so you can adapt the thing to your needs. As you may have noticed I currently drive the leds with an ESP8266 mcu, I assume the raspi can do this too but haven't come to install the libraries for it. Update: raspi can drive the neopixels, but it's not good at it. You end up running the led stuff as root. The nodemcu on the other hand drives 2 lines/rings of neopixels and dimms 2 strips of white led and stil has so many gpio and cpu cycles free for extensions.. The sketch to use a ESP8266 as controller for this led-ring (plus 2 additional single-colour led strips at the extrusions and the printhead) can be found at https://github.com/planetar/tokoLights-led and a python script that can run as a daemon to read mqtt messages from octoPrint and send control codes to the ESP in order to sync the illumination with the octoPrint states is https://github.com/planetar/tokoLights-daemon About the case: the critical bit is the contact that links the cam to its breakout board. It just loves to disconnect. The 'gapFiller' - layer was an attempt to take pressure off that connection, but unfortunately the problem persists. I kept a window streaming the cam open while I assembled the case so at least I could spot the issue once it occurred. I do love the view from the rear though.