Daren SchwenkeI've settled on this camera. FOV is narrower (which is a good thing) than the newer Sony chip based ones, and it's cheaper.
"Mini" is still big enough to really mess with my setup though if I mounted it as intended. It would intersect my mirror arm mounts, the path for the mirror arm linkage, and my new adjustable stops.
Instead of making everything bigger/heavier here is the new plan:
I'll mount the PCB on the side and use the little flex cable attachment thingy on the camera itself to put the new camera basically where my old one was.
It still needs height adjustment, some more screw holes, and a little more clearance, but the rest of the design should mostly work like it is 3D printed bits wise. I can even keep the endoscope mount if someone finds a suitable inexpensive one with exposure control.
Electronics wise... radical departure time.
I had a couple Pi Zeros here just begging for a new project to consume them and I almost listened. The fact I could put the entire vision engine on the head and feed it just power was tempting, but alas logic won out.
The Raspberry Pi 3 gives me 4 cores and more memory and I really liked the idea of having a dedicated core available for each high processor usage task. So I got one core for OpenPnP itself and it's piggy JVM, one for OpenCV and it's (albeit simple here) neural network hungry nature, one for the unknown variable here... klipper, and one for the OS to keep the data moving around efficiently. The fact I get direct access to uncompressed images without delay and have enough resolution and speed to implement digital zoom went a long way too.
Trying to fit all that on a Zero made me uncomfortable and I haven't even built it yet!
I will probably just feed Machinekit for now though as writing new kinematics for klipper looks more than trivial, but I think the best path for everyone (except me) would be driving your existing Arduino hardware that way. I even ordered a RAMPS 1.4 board. I've been building printers for years now, and I'm proud to say that this will be the first Arduino based interface board that I actually didn't build myself on some perf board. The knock-off boards are down to $7 and that will save a lot of time.
I could be wrong about the Zero, but I'm probably right. Prove me wrong later.
So that's the plan, and the parts will arrive tomorrow.
I've been totally ruined by Prime.
EDIT: All the parts are here. It's been 12 hours... Yep. I'm ruined.
Discussions
Become a Hackaday.io Member
Create an account to leave a comment. Already have an account? Log In.
Ok Daren, I'll keep watchin' :)
Are you sure? yes | no
Man, you are really getting deep in this project, amazing. I actually was keeping up with the mirror set up and hoping U could make it work because it was giving me an idea for something in the future but now...hummm, we will see, still I think the arduino set up with the cam is a sure fire thing...Gotta love amazon prime :)
Are you sure? yes | no
Thank you.
I think the mirror arm setup will work well. I can slam it back and forth (now with the lights on it) and it stops in exactly the same spot every time. The printed flat mirror arm, once I tuned it to match a multiple of the nozzle width, was amazingly stiff for the weight as the path the extruder takes then spans the entire part.
If I had a better endoscope, it was a pretty good way to go. Focal length pre-set to what is needed, small form factor, and good depth of field. The lack of exposure control and poor quality kinda killed it though, and in the end, I think the Pi camera will be far superior.
Are you sure? yes | no
I'm gonna take a better look at the endoscope aspect of UR setup and see if I can make U a better one, the reason I say this is because I put together a quick down and dirty one for my test platform using POF(plastic optical fiber,) and the results are pretty good for test purposes, so if UR interested I don't mind taking time and seeing if I can help U out?
Are you sure? yes | no
Thanks for the offer, but don't waste your time. I'm going to go forward with the Pi now.
Half the point of the endoscope was it was 2 megapixel and like $8. It was an experiment. In the world of buying one of each I could probably come up with something under $20 which checks all the boxes, but right now I know the Pi camera will work and probably work better.
Are you sure? yes | no