3D Printed Camera Mount for Neptune 4 Max

hey guys and welcome to functional print Friday so we're down here in my basement shop today this is where all my 3D printers live and the one in front of me is a Neptune 4 Max by eligo and this thing is absolutely gigantic fact can you guys even see it yeah it's hard to even fit the thing in frame it's just it's huge here's the build plate off my mark 3s my prusa mark 3s just for comparison it is the build plate on this is almost four times the size of the standard build plate on a mark 3 so I've wanted a large format printer for a while uh there's a number of functional printing jobs that I just haven't been able to tackle because they're just too big and they don't lend themselves to you know joining Parts together very well I actually reached out to eligo and asked them if they would be interested in providing a printer to the channel to tackle some of these larger jobs and they said no I said pretty please and they said No at this point I fell into a deep state of depression and upon seeing this my wife got me one for Christmas all right so here we are we've got a Neptune 4 Max to play with on the channel and let me know down in the comments if you guys are interested in seeing a review on this I originally planned on doing one as I set it up like I have for other 3D printers and I'll be honest I encountered a number of issues with this machine that made it that I really could not do a review on it uh right away um and I'm still working out some issues with it but I do think it is really good Hardware for the money there's just there's a number of issues with the firmware and with the software that do make it a challenge to use in comparison to the other printers that we've recently looked at but again let me know down in the comments if you're interested in my thoughts and you know just kind of a general review on this printer but what I want to take a look at today on this printer is adding a camera to it this printer did not come with a camera uh it does run Clipper and it does have a USB port on the front and I dug through my old junk and I found a PC web camera and I plugged that into the USB port and Clipper did pick it up uh I think pretty much any camera that works quote unquote driverless uh you know one of the well supported USB video cameras will work in Clipper and this one came up no problem and I've got it just sitting here on some foam blocks and I have actually used this to keep an eye on jobs but there's an obvious problem here is that the camera is stationary it sits down here so you know for small prints for prints that are not particularly High that's fine but you know as I have a taller print you know that ends up up here I'm not going to be able to see the part of the job that the printer is actually printing I'll just see the bottom of the print moving around so my thought is to figure out a way uh to maybe attach the camera right to the Gantry it's on this space that's designed to I think like go on the top of your monitor and that's kind of heavy I think there's there's probably actually metal weights built into this guy just to make it heavy so I'd like to eliminate that and maybe have just this upper part of the camera like attached right to the this bracket here on the side of the Gantry Let's uh let's get this guy apart see what we're dealing with okay so there is like a rubber foot we not a rubber foot but like a rubber cover underneath here that hopefully is hiding a screw yep there like a little spacer piece in there okay that is not what I was expecting to see so I don't know how well the camera is picking that up but this actually has almost kind of like a ball head on it or like a half of a ball head I was kind of expecting this to be just a flat base here with a screw going into it but it looks like they've actually designed this with it kind of like half of a ball head I guess for it to swivel on so that's going to make this a bit trickier I really thought we'd just be you know mounting this to something and kind of screwing it in place but you know what I'm up for the challenge let's see if we can see if we can design this sort of half sphere shape I'm not going to try and measure this on camera but what I think I'm going to do is start by just measuring the the outside dimensions of uh this sort of partial sphere uh take a guess at what part of the sphere we're seeing because I don't I actually don't think we're seeing from like the midpoint up halfway I think we're seeing above the midpoint of the sphere well you know what I think there's just going to be some trial and error here I am going to I'm going to draw this to the best of my ability we'll do a test print we'll see how it fits all right and here is our first test print and honestly this looked a lot better in CAD than it does in person it printed really nicely it's not that it's that I think we're too big yeah I mean we're way taller than the original part um but the height might not matter I think we have extra room here in like the mounting point on the camera I think they just for whatever reason this one's flatter on the top let's see if it fits yeah not really uh I mean it does it goes our our Center diameter is good our boore but it's not it's not going onto it far enough if we if you guys can see that if we compare that to this guy it's going all the way in and sitting inside that that Groove around the edge I designed that same Groove into here but it's not seating into it uh so I think we're just too big let me um let me bring down the size of this partial sphere a little bit and flatten off a bit more on the top and see if we can get a better fit all right and I'm back I went I think 1 mm smaller on the uh the overall diameter of our partial sphere and I knocked down the top of bit see how that looks in comparison to this yeah visually that looks a lot closer somehow our boore tightened up I didn't actually change the dimension of that boore at all it's just a variance in the uh in the print um I mean it goes on there oh and that actually yeah it goes all the way into the groove now that's um that's actually a really good fit the board could probably be a tiny bit looser although it was pretty tight getting it off of the the stock piece as well originally yeah that's nice all right I think that's good let's go back to the printer and see what we need to uh see what we need to figure out to get this actually mounted on there okay so I guess it doesn't really matter which side we put it on um either side as long as we're looking in towards the print should be okay but I noticed there's a lot of stuff on this side this stepper Motors over here as well as the clamp for our cables it probably makes sense to put the camera over here particularly since the USB port is on this side as well and honestly I don't know if the cord would be long enough to go underneath the printer that way and make it all the way up to the top of the Gantry because remember uh this Gantry is going to go up if we're attaching the camera onto the X Gantry uh the cord's got to be long enough that it can make it all the way up and in fact let me bring this up a little bit so we're not trying to look at it all the way down here all right that's a lot easier to see so what I'm thinking is we've got this bracket here I think this is anodized aluminum I guess it doesn't really matter what it's made from but it's got a hole in it here or slot I guess you'd say and it has a slot in it down here it's got these two screw heads here which we would need need to work around um and obviously we have like this uh uh this piece here this tensioning piece and this endcap on the rail but I'm wondering if we could just design a piece that like mates against this surface here maybe has a Fastener that comes in from the back comes out over this and then gives us like uh kind of like an arm coming out uh to mount the camera on I'm thinking the camera would be like here that would give us a nice view of the bed and again it's going to go up and down with the the same to match the height of the extruder so as we get to the top of larger prints we'll still be able to see what's going on yeah looking again at this side cuz I did consider the fact that our wire bundle is already over here so if we were to use this side uh we could just have the camera wiring kind of attached to this bundle if it was long enough but there's other stuff to contend with over here as well there's additional screw heads from the stepper motor and we don't really have CLE clear access to those mounting holes this one's blocked by this bracket back here and the bottom one is blocked as well so I think we will work from uh from this side so generally when I'm going to design something that has to mate very precisely with something else in this case uh both this plate here in the back as well as contend with uh this bracket here or this um uh this cover here on the end for the tensioning it makes sense to draw this stuff first anytime I've tried to skip it and just immediately draw my design based off the you know just running back and forth and getting dimensions on this uh I overlook something so I think that's what I'm going to do first I think let's draw up this metal bracket back here we'll draw up the position of the slots we'll draw up where these uh Fastener heads are and we'll draw up just a rough idea I mean we're not going to draw all the different geometry here uh but we'll draw the the maximum measurement so uh you know the the length of it in this direction the depth of it where where it's deepest and the uh the height of it so do that and I'll bring you guys [Music] back [Music] all right our first test piece is done and I printed this on the bamboo labs x1c and uh when I came back to get the part off the machine when I got the alert that it was done I realized I forgot to turn supports on but it actually bridged across there pretty well I mean yeah these are a little bit loose down here I would print this again if this was our final one but I don't impressed with how well that bridge that let's see if it fits it seems like it's sitting flush against the bracket we're not bumping our tensioner cover here at all but I think our screw head is I shouldn't our screw head's not off our our hole here our clearance hole looks like it's off by about half a millimeter it's not enough that it's not clearing but it's enough that you can see that you're slightly off center and our rounded corner here is a little bit off from the uh the rounded corner on the bracket we're we're flush here flush here we're flush here I just didn't get that rounded Corner completely right I assumed it matched our one over here and it it does not it's actually it's a little bit different from the looks of it let's see if this is long enough yeah that looks like it'd be about right comes out far enough that uh this piece would be centered over like maybe the last one inch of that I tell you what standing here looking at that I feel like that's actually going to be too high because our extruder is all the way down here the nozzle I should say is all the way down here that's like 3 in lower than our lens so we're not really going to be able to see what's going on at printing height well you know what what if we just put the camera underneath of it yeah that's pretty close now we're only about maybe half an inch higher than than the nozzle which you know from any distance away I mean I guess if we're right here we might not see the the nozzle but if we're you know at the midpoint or basically anywhere other than the end of the rail uh the angle should allow us to see the the tip of the nozzle and actually if we put it underneath we could go yeah do it this way so you guys can see the angle I had it so originally we were going to be up here and I'm thinking about coming down here but if we go underneath we can actually come all the way down into this space there's no reason why not uh so we can actually shorten this arm by quite a bit and we'll mount it underneath uh hopefully we can flip the camera image uh in Clipper I should probably check to make sure that we can flip the camera image because we're going to be upside down if we go from here to here but I can imagine they didn't Implement a way to rotate or flip the camera image so all right I'm going to take a closer look at this off camera just to make sure that all my Dimensions look dead on and and I'll get working on a revision of this that has a shorter arm and has our uh our camera mount actually integrated into it right now this is just a you know obviously like a rough test [Music] one [Music] all right I am back and I'm relieved to say that even though we're now printing this uh vertically uh this sort of half sphere shape uh vertically instead of like this I mean it's pretty much a given that printing it like this we're going to end up with a nice clean um print all the way around but now we had to print it like like this cuz it's got to stand up on on this face down here it is still really clean hopefully the camera is focusing on that that came out really nice I printed this at uh .12 MIM layer height and our little bit of style on here also looks really good just breaking these Corners uh putting the bevel onto here it looks it looks like a much more professional part already but let's see if the camera fits it's not going in there quite all the way I think I might have spoken too soon on this printing vertically I think our boore closed up a little bit because this just seems like it's catching up it's not quite going all the way in and we're also a little bit close if you guys can see that the front edge of the or should say the the uh the edge here on the camera is just hitting the uh the bracket a little bit so we'll need to we need to bring this out a little bit further and I'm going to need to adjust the dimensions of that boore uh for printing vertically to be just the right size but you know I bet you we could still get the screw in there and see what this guy looks like by the way whenever you're putting a screw like this into plastic there's a real risk of cross-threading that hole and you can get away with it once or twice but for something like this where we're going to be prototyping this I'm probably going to be taking the screw in and out a number of times so I want to make sure that we don't cross thread this hole and there's an easy way to do that when you put the screw in or when you go to put the screw in uh don't just force it in there and start turning go backwards at first instead I'm going this real close to the camera and I'll be real quiet let's see if you can hear this turn backwards it didn't really make much of a noise here I'm going to do it again I'll go backwards again notice what that screw is doing it's it's backing up and then it drops back in and when it drops back in that's when you start turning the direction to insert that screw and you should feel almost no resistance because you're going back in the original threads that that screw already made there uh it works in metal too but in metal it's a lot harder to cross thread I find in plastic you really really need to use that trick to make sure you don't cross thread it that's not bad let me see if I can find something to hold this on here and we'll see what that image looks like all right found a miniature one of these clamps let me see if we can hold it in place with this guy all right that view is pretty decent but one thing I'm noticing even though we're almost all the way up at the top of the gantry here we got about maybe 80 mm of build volume left that I could raise this guy up further we can't see the build plate at all and that's okay we don't need to see that but I realized you know I was so focused on making sure that we can see what's going up on the top plane of our print uh I wasn't thinking about the fact that you know we have a lot of real estate up here that we don't really need to see I guess it might be nice to see the filament going into the extruder but anything north of that like so north of sort of where my hand is here is sort of wasted space we just don't need to see up there what I'm getting at is I think we could probably angle this camera down a little bit let me take the screw out and play with the angle all right I went and I grabbed my digital angle gauge and I'm just holding it up against the camera here because I've got to freehand this and hopefully this is going to make this real easy to see what angle or about what angle we want to be at and I'll put up the image from the camera here on the screen as well and I can see that image as well looking across the room at a monitor so let's see that's our height that's pretty good right there we can still see just above the extruder but we're seeing much more of the print and not the sky here in my basement and that looks like it's I don't know somewhere between 13 and 15° we'll call it about 14° I mean it doesn't have to be perfect it's just it's a lot better than than that there's the image that we had and we're talking about going down to again right about there that's going to be a lot better all right so hopefully it's not going to be too much of a challenge to rework this part to have an angle because of course I already went and tried to make this pretty with a bunch of curved surfaces on it so me get started on that and I'll bring you guys back all right and here is our updated part and I was able to get the 14° angle on this and I also added an elu logo here on the front just to kind of and try and make it even match the the printer a little bit better and I beefed this up quite a bit down here since we were rotating this at an angle anyway that gave me the opportunity to uh sort of triangulate some additional support underneath this guy and it is really strong now I mean I can't Flex that at all and it's not that the camera weighs that much but since this printer is going to be moving and shaking around while it's printing uh it's really important that this is nice and stiff because we don't want even the littlest bit of flex in this because it's going to it's going to mess with our camera image and I actually printed two of these I printed this one on the bamboo X1 Carbon and I printed one right here on the the uh the elu uh Neptune 4 Max uh as well and honestly it looks really good the supports didn't work quite as well because I inadvertently printed this one oriented like this and this one oriented like this so the supports on the bamboo one uh lined up directly with our edges to support underneath here and this one they were running the other direction so the edges of this didn't get supported as well but that's not the fault of the printer uh but what's really interesting is I noticed two things about this print one that I really like and one that I got to fix so if we compare this to the one from the bamboo x1c look how much nicer the eligo logo looks and it took me a little while to figure this out with going on is well actually let me just show you in the slicer okay so here's that part sliced in Orca studio and this is the way that it printed on the xmon carbon and we're looking at the actual paths that the printer is going to follow and you can see the infill here in that logo that's why we have just sort of not really a super clean look there because it's drawing all those really really short lines to make up that logo on the top and you notice also even on our other top layers here if I go down a little bit off the top slice you can see there's a whole bunch of walls that make up this print to give it a tremendous amount of strength but as we get up to that top layer uh now all of the sudden we only have one wall and then we have that infill and that's giving us a really nice look on the rest of the part rather than having all of those lines but it's ruining the appearance of this logo here let me turn off the only one wall on top surfaces and slice this again there we go now you can see we get a nice path here on the logo and that's going to give us a much cleaner look but we have all these walls visible on the rest of the part now it doesn't actually look quite as bad as you see here I mean we have quite the contrast between the yellow and the red uh just due to the different line types here uh on our our map but the problem is right down here these really stand out that's all the lines that make up the slicing for these bore holes down here in the bottom and you do notice that in the top surface of the part you don't really notice these as much because it's following the edge of the part or the edge of this uh uh this bevel here but you do really notice that I mean your eye goes right to it it's like what is that so I started to go down the road of how do I get the best of both of these worlds how do I get this slicing um up here on the top surface of the logo but the slicing of just one wall and a nice smooth top surface everywhere else on the part particularly since I don't uh want to see these um these walls uh down here on those BS and I thought oh no problem um I know how to do this I can just add a modifier block on here in fact let me pull one in so I got my modifier in just the right spot where it's only touching just the top of that logo and not the top surface of the part and I went and I turned only one wall on top surfaces back on for the main part and then turned it off for our modifier and I sliced it again and again and again and no matter what I did I kept thinking maybe I just had it not quite the right spot but it kept slicing it the same way and I looked online and I discovered a lot of people saying the same thing and it just it seems like the slicer ignores the modifier parameters for anything that impacts outer walls on the print it doesn't seem like you can change um that feature with a modifier in Orca slicer bamboo Studio or prusa slicer so I was about to give up and I had another idea and for this we're going to want to modify uh just the parameters of um of the things within our Cube here so if we go to objects and we make sure we have our Cube selected and we scroll down I thought what if we turned ironing on for this so I selected all top surfaces and let's slice it again and check that out now the ironing here by the way is represented in it's sort of this I don't know like beige pink color and you can see it's only going to iron the top surface of that logo and it's not going to modify any of the rest of the slicing in the part actually I realized um I forgot to turn back off the uh the only one while on top surface let me do that quick there we go now we truly have the best of both worlds we have that only one wall on top surfaces including the surface up here and we don't see those bores anymore even though those lines are there they're just not on the top layer you can see those outer walls for those BS go off all the way up until we hit that top surface but when we get up to that logo we see that it's going to iron that logo so let's give that a try all right that came out really nice I got to say I may have dismissed ironing uh too soon I remember trying it when it first came out and I just don't like the look across a whole top surface but for something like this where you want to accent that logo not only do we have the the logo raised a little bit and only just a little bit from the rest of our surface here but because we have sort of a matte look on the uh the top infill and we have such a nice shiny smooth look on the logo like that actually looks really good I got to remember that trick for other prints and just ironing just part of it uh to get that nice contrast I think all that's left to do on this guy is to tap these holes out for M3 so I'm going to run out to the garage do that quick and I'll bring you guys back all right these are tapped and ready to go and I measured the depth of the bracket that we're mounting this up against and we're going to want to go with an m M 3x 8 mm uh screw for this or actually two of these and I check through my stash of stuff I actually have Fender washers in M3 as well and since the the whole size on those slots that we're going to be going through on the bracket at the end of the Gantry is pretty big uh we do need a fender washer for this so let move the camera and uh get these get these screws in and I'll bring you back all right guys I am really happy with how that looks uh not only did our ironing come out really nice on that logo but more importantly this thing is you know actually uh securely holding the camera at the right angle so I think at this point the only thing left to do is test it what do you say this one time we print a Beni and on that bombshell I just wanted to say guys as always thanks for hanging out in the shop with me for this week's design and video if this is by chance your first time here I do a new video like this every single week it's always a functional print um I covered the engineering and the thought process you know behind the design uh you know no just multicolored garbage of the week so if you're into that sort of thing check out some of my other videos and if you see stuff you like hit that subscribe button and guys if you do I'll see you next [Music] Friday

Channel: Functional Print Friday

Views: 2,785

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Id: fsqHY-fASec

Length: 28min 16sec (1696 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 13 2024