Cheap Remote Monitoring for ANY 3D Printer! #3dprinting

hello on my desk here is an AET A8 that's right an absolute dinosaur of a 3D printer in terms of modern 3D printing standards this thing is wholly outdated however surprisingly it has something in common with some very new and very expensive 3D printers and that is the fact that unless you're in the room with your mark1 eyeballs trained on the print bed you cannot see if this thing is making spaghetti or not that's right even something shiny and new like the prusa X doesn't have a webcam you you can remote monitor that printer you can see the status of the print percentage wise and the temperatures but again you you can't see if you have a Spaghetti Factory taking place on the print bed unless you're in the room with the printer now we have some standard options for adding webcams to a 3D printer what you do is of course you go out you buy a Raspberry Pi you buy an SD card for the Raspberry Pi uh you can either print an enclosure or buy an enclosure you buy a power supply and you pair that with a webcam that you print something to mount it to the printer somehow and there you go you have remote monitoring of your 3D printer however that can get expensive fast especially if you have multiple printers in today's video I'm going to show you how using an esp32 cam you can add webcam functionality that you can stream anywhere in your home network for under $10 to any 3D printer you own so let's get started so the ESP 32 cam is quite a nice compact simple board and it has all the features that you need to set up your own home live streaming webcam and as you can see with the board here we have the esp32 controller we have a built-in Wi-Fi antenna you do have the option of adding an additional antenna to this if you want to get more range out of it and of course we do have the webcam itself now you do have several different options of what esp32 board you can buy I just went on Amazon and I picked one up that comes with this little breakout board that connects to the pins on the esp32 now this add-on breakout board here uh does give us a USB port which is going to come in real Handy for several reasons namely it is going to allow us to program the esp32 without having to get a separate USB ftdi programmer and wire them up individually every time we program one of these and also it's a USB micr port so now depending on the final setup we can actually just power this via USB if we want or I'm going to show you an alternative option that just uses two wires so we have the ESP 32 cam itself here and we're going to have to start off by programming this so the first thing we're going to have to do is download the Arduino IDE and I'll have links for everything in the video description for everything you're going to need to go ahead and do this I'll also link to a written guide that I found on how to do this if that's more your thing so downloading the Arduino IDE is quite simple just download whatever version for whatever uh operating system you are using and after you extract that file just fire up the Arduino I and we're going to have to do some setup first just to make it ready for programming an esp32 device after opening this up for the first time you probably are going to have a couple popups to allow certain features and whatnot just let them do their thing and the first thing we're going to have to do is add esp32 support here so we're going to go to file go down to preferences now you're going to have to copy and paste the link here again I'll have this in the video description there we go then go to tools board manager and we're going to have to search for esp32 and install this one here by Express if systems go ahead let that do its thing so after you have that installed you can go ahead and connect your esp32 to USB plug it into your computer uh now normally I do find I have to restart uh the Arduino IDE just to get the next stuff to show up after installing the esp32 package but we're going to go ahead we're going to select our board and it's this one here now this is a ESP 32 Cam and you're going to have to select uh which one you have now I have an esp32s which is the same pinout as the AI thinker esp32 cam uh so we're going to go with that one and we're going to go here to file examples and we're going to find ESP 32 find camera camera web server we're going to select that and this is going to load up a pre-generated code to turn our esp32 cam into a home web server so we are going to have to change a few things here now for the exact bottle of esp32 Cam again I have the AI Tinker one so we're going to go down here find that one to find that one again depending which model of esp32 you go with you're may have to select a different one and then we're going to put our SSID and our password here for your home network so leave the quotation marks uh but put in your SSID and your password here and then after you have your SSID and password you can go ahead and hit upload now I'm going to go ahead and put my real Wi-Fi information on first before I do that now the first thing it's going to do is compile everything and then after it compiles everything hopefully you don't get any errors it'll go ahead and upload everything to the esp32 make sure you do not disconnect it during this time or you risk corrupting your esp32 so after the esp32 is flashed we do want to see what is the actual IP address that we connected to and you have a few different ways of doing this if your home router has a web UI ability that you can go in and just see everything that's connected to it you can get to it that way but also you can get the IP address through the Arduino IDE itself so we're going to go to tools serial monitor you're going to want to select uh 115,200 bow here and then afterwards you're going to hit the reset button on that breakout board there we go and there is our IP address so we're going to go ahead and copy that open up a web browser paste that in and there we go this is our web server so we have all the options right here the settings for the camera on the left we're going to bump up that resolution 800 by 600 and we're going to hit start stream and there is our webcam now first off it's probably not going to look the greatest cuz I have a uh a light here blowing out the iso in the background but first things first I'm going to put a big pin in this this is not a camera that you're going to be using to make fan fcy time lapses for easy Tick Tock and internet points this is simply a camera to remote monitor your print to make sure you are not making spaghetti so again the camera quality as you bump up the resolutions you can get some pretty high resolutions on this camera uh but you lose frame rate as you go up in resolution and I think this artifacting that you're seeing here uh is mostly due uh to the electrical noise from all these USBS so now I'm not going to go through all these settings here and uh tell you what they all are you can look those all up yourself I like leaving at 640 by 480 that's plenty enough resolution to see if my printer is making spaghetti and also you do have control over the LED on it which is actually surprisingly bright but it causes more static in the image uh so I'm going to go ahead and turn that off for now and lastly if you don't want to have the options here you can go ahead and just close them out now one cool thing you can do with an IP webcam is if your printer is running say rep WAP firmware for example in that web UI you actually have the ability to import an IP webcam feed so you can go ahead and use this with your printer running say a duet 2 or duet 3 uh for remote monitoring all within one nice clean web UI or on your web browser you could just have a bookmark file uh with links to all the asp32 cams or you can get fancy time into some home assistant system so you can monitor remotely several of them at the same time the choice is yours this is a very modular system you can set these up in multiple different ways and now we're going to go ahead and actually attach it to our printer we're going to have to solve the first thing which is how are we going to power this now you do have several different options for powering the esp32 cam since ours here came with this USB breakout board you could just plug in a USB cable and power it via that uh if the printer has an available USB port that outputs 5 Vols not all do the AET here doesn't uh you could just tap in there or if you have a wall wart that you can plug in into or if you have a power bar that has USB power delivery there there's several different ways that you can do this via USB but what we're going to do is actually not even use the breakout board we only need this to program it by the way so if you plan on getting more esp32s in the future uh what you can do is just buy one combo that comes with the board that you need to program it and then just take it off and use that for others and when you run them you can just run them like this because we actually only need 5 volts in ground to power this that's it and this does not use a ton of power you can pretty much pull five Vols from anywhere on a controller board most controller boards have 5 volt and ground pins available to tap into either extra end stops or in the case of the AET here I'm pulling 5 volts and ground directly from the extra um ribbon cable connector for a LCD screen this doesn't use a ton of power you don't need a crazy mosfet or anything like that also if you're using a more modern controller board uh you can set fan voltages uh using a jumper usually 5 12 and 24 volt so if you really wanted to you could get fancy set that to 5 volts and then you also have the ability to turn on and off your webcam if that's a feature you want so for the AET here I've gone ahead and made up a little power cable here I've tapped into 5 volts and ground off of two available pins on the controller and we're just going to go ahead and connect our esp32 cam now and I've gone ahead and printed a simple little case here uh that I found on thingiverse or printables I can't remember where it it's a case just Google esp32 cam case or get fancy and design your own and now we're going to go ahead and plug this in so again we have 5 volt in ground make sure you plug it in to the right pins on your ESP 32 cam you don't want to fry it now and mine is luckily labeled on the front here always double check the wiring on your esp32 cam or any microcontroller because sometimes uh offbrand ones have different pinouts you know they might function the same um they might switch some pins around on you so we got 5 Vols at the top and ground below it so 5 volt in ground let's go ahead power this on there we go uh there is no status LED on the esp32 by itself unfortunately go ahead put that in the case there we go and now we're going to make sure this is actually working okay we have our web server there start the stream that up to 800 by 400 there we go and as you can see um pulling 5 volts from the printer we no longer have those lines there so that was probably electrical interference and for mounting the camera to our printer I'm just going to go ahead and use some VHB tape because you know it's an an A8 it deserves the best that's good enough now you can get esp32 cams with different camera modules this is just the standard one that comes with it you can get widescreen cameras as well uh the choice is yours there's sort there's multiple different sources for esp32 cams for multiple different vendors so just find the one that works for you this was just the cheapest one on Amazon that I could get next day and that is it very simple to do very easy to set up you can do this in 10 minutes it's under $10 it gets cheaper the more cameras you buy and it barely uses any power so you can easily add this to pretty much your entire fleet of printers for a very very very reasonable price if you have some sort of Home assistant or server on your home network you you can set up security software to automatically record all these uh it it the sky is the limit these are very very modular type uh controllers and cameras so you can do a lot with this this is an esp32 it's programmable you can have some real good fun with this uh depending on what your end goal is and in my case here it was just a very very simple webcam that I can add to a printer in this case this is going to go on my prusa uh Mark 3.5 that's where I'm going to probably end up mounting this permanently uh simply so I can monitor that printer uh remotely because while it does have prusa connect because it is a prusa 3.5 it's got the new controller in it from the prusa markv that only tells me percentage of print completion and temperatures it doesn't tell me if I got a big old bowl of spaghetti on the bed so I hope you enjoyed the video today nice quick little simple video on how to cheaply add a live stream webcam to pretty much any printer on your home network uh for under $10 and a little bit of wire and some crimping or soldering you can get really fancy with this you can you can do a lot of customization with this setup I just showed you the simplest way to go about it so again I'll have links in the description uh for all the information if you want to do this yourself and also while you're down there don't forget to like that smash button subscribe to the channel if you're not subscribed and uh yeah let me know what you think in the comments below so take care and cheers

Channel: Nero3D the Canuck Creator

Views: 50,420

Keywords: 3d, printer, printing, 3d printer, 3d printing, 3dp, fdm, fff, filament, voron, nero, nero3d, nero3dp, diy, hack, custom, reprap, esp, 32, esp32, cam, camera, monitor, remote, view, guide, tutorial, how to, how, to, esp-32, esp32 cam, tinker, tinker cam, ov650, ov, alternative, rrf, klipper, marlin

Id: RJSf1HTca84

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024