Timelapse suggestions

[steve220]

I enjoy making timelapses of my prints. With my budget printer, they come out nice because the bed stays stationary and only the printhead moves. This gives a good POV as the model builds in the middle of the frame. With the M2, they don't come out so well because everything seems to be moving around. I assume others are also recording their prints, so I'm looking for advice on where you are mounting the camera to get good videos.

[jsc]

You can try mounting a lightweight camera to the bed, but you can't do that with a printed part because the bed gets hot, plus you may have issues avoiding it. If you have a camera mount (I have a side mount design on thingiverse), you can in theory put in some gcode at the start of every layer to move the bed to a standard position to take a shot, at the expense of increased printing time and decreased print quality.

[ednisley]

everything seems to be moving around

If you don't mind some hardware gimmickry (*), M240 triggers a camera. You can have the slicer insert that at every layer change, which might get you most of the way toward the goal.

http://reprap.org/wiki/Gcode#M240:_Trigger_camera

Use a G0 X.. Y.. instruction before triggering the camera to put the platform & extruder in a specific position. If you do that after the layer change, the nozzle won't scrape over the just-laid layer. The additional motion will slow down the printing quite a bit, so maybe just start with a camera trigger.

(*) Define PHOTOGRAPH_PIN in Configuration.h, recompile / load the firmware, then wire a Canon camera to that pin.

[steve220]

Thanks, I'm using octoprint, which can trigger on z change. Still quite a bit of movement in the vids. I'll need to research modifying/compiling firmware, may be a project down the road a bit. Attaching a cam to the bed may be the best compromise for now. I'll see what others have done along those lines.