Reviving My Camera: How Shapr3D and 3D Printing Brought It Back to Life

Photo by Osman Talha Dikyar on Unsplash

I’d been dabbling with 3D printing for about 9 months now, with the classic, Ender 3 (with like a gazillion upgrades) and I ran into some trouble.

The camera mount I was using for monitoring this printer, which was 3D printed; ended up breaking as I closed the door shut for the wardrobe in which I’d put up my printer (boy has she been a nomad with over 10 relocations at this point :| ).

For most of this journey so far, I’d just been printing opensource/free models off Thingiverse/Thangs, but this time I felt comfortable making my own camera mount.

Now the camera in question here is the TPLink Tapo C100, which works surprisingly well with Eroji’s rtsp2mjpg streamer.

I ended up opening it up to adjust the “fixed” focus lens that was just fixed by some hard glue, nothing that my Dremel couldn’t take care of, but by far, this has hands-down, been the best camera setup I could use very well integrated with Octoprint, which I use to control my Ender 3 remotely.

How it started?

Not too long ago, I came across this really cool tutorial on Shapr3D that made custom 3D modelling not a very far fetched dream.

I always wanted to build my own 3D models from scratch, but the starting friction to learn a complex tool like AutoCAD or Blender was too high. Seeing the demo on how quickly and intuitely you could navigate around this tool got me intrigued and got right on with the app.

Their onboarding was SO SIMPLE and easy to use, that I ended up learning how to use the app in less than a day!

Kudos to their team who built that onboarding flow.

Anyway, it had been a couple of weeks of me working through tutorials and watching how to build stuff on Shapr3D, when the camera mount gave in.

It was time. To put this to use.
I mean, yeah, I could have just printed the same mount all over again, and used the same thing, but the friction to mould a new one has just gone down way too much by this point.

So I set off into a sleepless night of prototyping this camera mount.

The Journey

I really wish I could have linked Timelapses for the build, but this was the thing making the timelapses!

So pictures are gonna have to do the trick for now.

Measurements

To start off I had to take measurements and start building around that. I used a simple trick to get the right scale in.

I put up the PCB against a plain sheet of paper and placed a scale next to it and captured it as well as I could with the scale marking visible. I should probably get an alternative scale that doesn’t have so much reflections 🤔

With the picture ready to go, I imported it into X/Y plane on Shapr3d and started sketching around the imported picture.

Revision 1

My first revision was just a simple box with blocks that would hold the PCB in place. and

v1

I’d put in just a couple of notches to see if the PCB notches were aligning properly with the print. Bear in mind, the first time I ever caliberated my printer for dimensional accuracy was like 2 days ago, so I was skeptical if I still had it right and shapr3d’s exports would be printed with the same accuracy.

To my surprise, it did work!

Also, one issue I faced with this version was edge warping. Not sure which of these things helped, but I reduced the printing temperature/heated bed temp and made sure to not open the printer bay until the print was done (just to keep the temperature constant)

Revision 2

Seeing how well it fit in the first go, I felt more confident and made it a little more complex.

Changelog:

• Added notches across all corners
• Added standoffs to offset the components at the bottom side of the PCB
• Added a powersupply cut out to connect the adapter.
• Reduced x width by a few millimeteres for a more snug fit
• Reduced Buildplate temperature by 10 degress so that the variations isn’t too high due to atmospheric changes, tried to leave the printer bay untouched until print was completed (To tackle corner warping)

And this is what it looked like!

v2 with corner notches and PCB standoffs

v2 with less warping and power supply cutout

Improvements:

• As you can see the warping had reduced significantly, so that was a win.
• Better snug fit on both x/y axis

Revision 3

Now that I had the dimensions right, I went ahead and added the long stick with a ball at the end for mounting.

Changelog:

• Added slots at the base for air circulation (kinda surprised how well this came out)
• Added mounting ball socket on the right side

v3 with power supply cut out and ventilation holes

v3 with power slot and ball mount

Problems to fix:

• The power notch started way too low and didn’t allow me to plug in the power supply — This happened since, I forgot to factor in the standoffs on which the PCB was mounted on.
• The extra smoothened transitions from body -> mounting stick, with poor supports caused the ball to not be printed properly; will fix this in the next iteration

Revision 4

With this revision, I was fairly confident that this was it! The final revision!

Changelog:

• Added SD Card slot cutout
• Reduced X axis further to accomodate SDCard slot
• Reduced taper radius from Body -> Mounting stick to make it more sharp and less difficult geometry to print
• Moved up the power cutout to sit flush with the stand offs + pcb thickness

v4 with ventilation and SD Card slots

v4 Ball socket fixed

v4 — Ball socket and SD Card aligned slightly upwards

But yes, I was wrong. This wasn’t my final iteration to be built out.

Problems to fix:

• SD Card alignment was off by a couple of millimeters
• X Axis width could be further reduced by a millimeter or two, to make the casing more compact
• Not enough friction in the ball joint, since I’d cut off too much from the end

Revision 5

Finally. The perfect one.

This had everything lined up. But I’ll just let the pictures do the talking on this on.

v5 Tapo C110 Camera on Ball mount

And thats it! Thats all that I needed to get the camera mounted on my Printer.

I chose not to add an additional cover on the front, since I intended on mounting this on the Z axis and wanted to reduce the weight as much as possible.

Conclusion

Long story short, if you’ve been thinking of getting that 3D printer,
just BUY THE DAMN THING!.

I’ve been a tinkerer and builder my whole life, and honestly, this has been an eye-opening skillset that I’ve added to my arsenal.

Also, you happen to have an iPad lying around, don’t think once. Just get the App.

‎Shapr 3D CAD modeling

I don’t think there’s anything is as simple and intuitive as this that can help you build 3d models so quickly. And yes, albeit a bit expensive for a small hobbyist; the value it provides is way more than I can put into words.

I mean, At this point, I could build a fricking IronMan suit (out of plastic, though, for now 😛) from scratch! (Okay maybe I’m just being too cocky, but I feel that anything is possible!)

That being said, with the age of AI; I might just use Llama-Mesh over time to build models, eventually; like imagine the possibilities!

GitHub - nv-tlabs/LLaMA-Mesh: Unifying 3D Mesh Generation with Language Models

“Hey Google, send an dragon print to my Ender 3 for my nephew’s birthday”

But until that becomes a reality, here’s to Shapr3D 🍻
for making lives easier for us tinkerers.

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Peace ✌🏾