My Pi Camera Mount for the Ender 3
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WARNING: If you print the mounting plate in PLA it will soften if you heat your bed up too high. (OOPS!) It's just a little too close to the bed heater. :( This was working great for me until I needed to print something in PETG and heated the bed up just a little too high. I've since reprinted the mount in Amazon Red PETG at 50% infill (to counteract some of the springiness inherent in PETG) and it's been working great ever since. I've used a number of different mounts for the Raspberry Pi camera. The first I tried was one of the many designs that clips to the X axis driver cover. This has the advantage of being simple, out of the way, and moving with the X axis arm as the Z rod pushes it up, but it is pretty close to the model and since it doesn't move with the build plate, it can be a little hard to monitor a build in progress, as you have to wait for the part of the model you care about to be shifted in to place as the Y axis moves. I wanted something that moved with the build plate. I liked some of the concepts in sb43201's clip-on mount but I didn't like that the camera mounted upside down when clipped to the bed and I didn't really like clipping it to the bed anyway as it tended to get in the way of the print head (particularly since I'm using a bed leveler). I also found that the ball and socket system in that design just didn't work well for me. And finally, I also didn't like how short the mounting arm was. So I decided I needed to come up with something I liked better. For my first attempt, I tried modifying drspod's Ender 3 reinforced Handle (thing:3340432) but I felt the mounting system, wrapped around the bed leveling screws, was a bit nasty and it wouldn't work with the shelf system I'd installed under my bed. Eventually, I decided to build my own camera mounting plate, extend sb43201's arm so that the camera was farther from the build plate, flip the camera mount itself so that the camera would fit the right way round, and chuck the ball and socket mount altogether for a mashup of the hinge connector. Finally, I designed three right angle joints so that the camera could be perfectly oriented even if the boom warped a little (which mine has) or if I decided to mount the camera somewhere else later (which I've also done from time to time). The mounting plate has the advantage of not requiring ANY screws or anything, it just snaps into place and is held there by gravity and friction. It also mounts above the bed mounting frame so it doesn't impede the leveling screws and it clears any other little add ons you might have on the printer (such as drawers or whatnots). All of these parts are really easy to print with the exception of the angle joints since they will require some internal support depending on how you orient them on the build plate. Technically you don't really need to print the angle joints at all, but if you decide to, you should probably print three of them to give you complete flexibility when orienting the camera. Each of the joints requires a 12mm M3 bolt and hex nut. The main mount and the right-angle joints were designed in Fusion 360. The remixing of the camera holder and the longer camera arm were quickly accomplished in Tinkercad. Pros of this build: Having a camera that moves with the print bed so the object being built is always in the same spot. Camera is right-side up. Camera enjoys three degrees of freedom for precise aiming. Camera is far enough away from the build plate to see pretty much all of it. Cons of this build: THE MOUNTING PLATE IS TOO CLOSE TO THE BED HEATER TO WITHSTAND BED TEMPS ABOVE AROUND 60C WHEN PRINTED IN PLA! Having a boom that's so long can cause the image to go out of focus during a fast travel or jerky Y movement. (This becomes a non-issue if your goal is to use Optolapse to make time lapses since the bed will be still when the photo is taken.) You might find it difficult to keep taller builds in frame with this setup. (For those I usually pull the camera off onto an external mount or use a different camera altogether.) Hopefully someone out there will find this useful and/or inspiring. Perhaps someone will improve upon it even further.
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