It would be very useful to install cameras for the 3D printers. For long unattended prints, that would allow members to log in to see if there are any problems. Just a simple cheap WiFi camera mounted to see plate (and possibly display).
I am happy to research options if interested.
Good idea,
Apollo currently shows a message of
“Crash detected.
Resume print?
Yes
No
“
@3:33 pm 1/24/2024
@15:33
Thanks! From your pic it does not look like anything is being dragged. If you can try hitting Yes to see if it will continue, I’d appreciate it. If it crashes again, I will just need to come in and check it out.
Is Hermes still printing?
I am lubricating the rails and resuming. Hermes still going strong
Thank you!! Saves me an hour round trip! I owe you a drink.
Why don’t we have cameras?
We need to skip ahead to AI cameras. They’ll keep you from launching new job if you didn’t take the prior job off the build plate, and usually alarm if the part detached from the bed or undergoes spaghettification. They can be configured to warn you or take over and stop the job automatically
Cameras have been talked about for as long as we’ve had 3D printers, but nobody’s actually done anything about it. It’s a project awaiting a champion.
Interesting site for 3D camera with Octoprint and Rasberry Pi compatibility. Not sure I follow all of this, but I did see another post on setting up Rasberry Pi for OctoPrint… perhaps this is the best time to consider both as we upgrade?
@pearlgreymusic has agreed to look into hooking up the cameras we have during the octoprint upgrade. Within the scope of that proposal, access to octoprint and those cameras is still only going to be available while you’re in the space.
Once we have that up and running smoothly, we can look into which plugins will make the most sense for securely letting folks have insight into what’s going on with their prints while they’re away from asmbly.
That will be great progress! Thanks for pursuing this.
We need to skip ahead to AI cameras.
Oh, dear deity, please no.
The minimal goal is to enable looking at pictures from the cameras from outside the space without costing a fortune, creating a network security disaster, or requiring somebody to mess with it every bloody day.
Nobody has come up with a good answer to all of those. You can’t use a cloud subscription system has it will cost far too much. You can’t just put webcams on an IP port exposed to the outside world as IoT devices have absolute dogshit security. You need something that will sit, work, and reboot itself without outside intervention, or you will get tired of maintaining it, and we’re back where we started.
There is nothing “off the shelf” that fits. So, it will be a bespoke system, and its reliability will suck until you iron the bugs out. Oh, and it will have to be documented for the next victim^Wsucker^Wvolunteer.
We do have a fairly modern network infrastructure, so walling off a a separate 3D-printer camera DMZ wouldn’t be a big deal.
AFAIK my K1 camera is doing all local processing, not cloud. You only need the cloud feature for checking the camera feed from a remote device, or receiving notifications about AI detection prompts
It detects foreign objects before starting (like the prior object not removed yet) but not spaghetti, I think my config isn’t set for it
I think that the camera initiative will not be as useful as people think it will be. However I could be totally wrong, Just my experience from watching a printer for work and see it fail I still can’t do anything about it(save kill the printer or possibly exclusion zones) until I’ll off of work so I get to say “cool beans it failed”. Spaghetti detective is nice but can sometimes hit false positives or not work when there is a noodly mess.
TLDR
Cameras are cool for time-lapse but as a watch dog not that game changing.
I’ve used octopi (octoprint on rasbian on rasberry pi) with cameras (pi cam v2 and a night vision version that didn’t work very well) for most of my printing. I haven’t yet used spaghetti detective, missed the time before it went to a cloud only subscription model. A colleague of mine said that there was something one could run on-prem with a reasonable powered workstation in a docker container that worked well enough for him that he didn’t resume his subscription to the cloud service.
I’d be game to try it – I may do that at home and get back to you. I’ll at least try to do the research on it. If anyone wants help to get this going I’d love to participate (I’m very new to asmbly but I live in tech).
octoprint behind a vpn may be a reasonable solution for the security (and it addresses the one comment about stopping the print remotely) – especially if we can somehow do single sign-on with one of the already extant authentication tools.
This is my view too. Timelapses are cool to show off but not a terribly useful feature. Live video feed can be good for peace of mind and depending on your personal situation, when to go to the makerspace to reset a failed print or get excited to retrieve some good parts, but I would be pretty wary about even being able to send a killswitch over the network.
But we already have cameras, its pretty easy to set up (except maybe the network/security stuff since that’s not my wheelhouse), and I don’t think it would hurt to add and if someone wants to lead that, I’m down as long as its compatible with our Octoprint plans moving forward and as long as the implementation is neat (wires secured out of the way, webcam mounted directly to the printer, printer is still easy to move in/out of the enclosure for repairs/maintenance without worrying about the camera)
I would like a live stream just so I know if I need to go and restart the print
Whether it is a live stream or a periodic photo capture, the real value is to be able to see if there is a problem or not and whether a 30+min drive in to intervene is warranted.
