This post has been a long while coming. I actually finished this quite some time ago but got busy with other things, work, binge-watching anime shows on Hulu, and building a wireless Arduino-based module for controlling a high-watt LED module I intend to use to provide light to the web camera pointed at the printer. But, that aside, I finally, after much frustration, got it to work! Well, work good enough. The clamp was discussed in the last post, all I had left were the arms to give the mount distance and some way to mount the camera.
Or so I thought…
Ball joints are Bollocks
Well, that’s not entirely true, I was mostly looking for a way to work bollocks into my blog, but they are kind of bollocks. You can see in the picture above a broken ball joint. Technically the joint is fine it’s the small screw used to attach a thing to the ball joint that failed. That little plastic screw is supposed to hold them onto the clamp or arm and this is a weak point and in fact so weak it breaks almost constantly.
[Retracted due to the intended family nature of this blog.]
OK, I needed a different and stronger way to change the angle and orientation of things. If only there were such a thing already that I could try to emulate.
Comming unhinged
I settled on the old standby, a simple hinge. That will allow movement, actually more than the ball joint as it turns out, from 0 to over 180 degrees. And by having a pin that can be rotated I can spin whatever the hinge is attached to 360 degrees. This was promising.
I jumped into Fusion 360 and started designing my hinge with the spinnable pins. Then I ran into some issues, as I documented in Short Takes – I want to go to Disneyland.
The failures were … depressing, to say the least. I think the frustration comes through in the above post. The hinge design itself was OK, it’s what I’m using – well iteration 2 or 3. There were just a lot of print and dumbassery issues on my part. But, after a little of this.
I ended up with this.
I was impressed that the screw actually worked. It’s a 4mm threaded screw and both the threads on teh screw and the threads in the hinge work! I’m impressed by this, actually, I didn’t think it would work, that’s pretty small stuff to be printing, especially the hole. I did have to s a little scraping and force the screw into the threaded hole, but hot-damn if it didn’t work.
Full disclosure, the intent of the screw was not only as the axle on which the hinge would rotate but was intended to be tightened down to lock the hinge in place. But, the “skinny” side of the hinge is too thick and rigid to allow this little plastic screw to work. However, the hinge does a good job of staying in place with the lightweight camera, so I’ll call it a win.
Reaching out
I’m not going to go too much into the arms. They are pretty basic. A simple cylinder with some … raised … I’m not sure what to call them. Raised ?ridges? along the length? I have it on my list to do a post on how I did that in Fusion 360 if anyone is interested.
I threaded holes in the cylinder about 10mm deep on each side so I could use a little 6mm threaded screw to attach them to something. For the final build, I attached 2 arms together with a short screw, actually, the threade part of a screw that had the head break off earlier.
Remember to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle to save the planet.
The short piece is also a test print I did for an earlier version of the arms. I just needed a little something to connect the camera mount to the hinge. And that worked fine.
Final thoughts
Is the webcam holder I created worth all the effort? Materially, no. It was a lot of effort for something I could have probably bought for a couple of bucks on wish.com and without the excitement of getting my credit card number stolen. But, with that said, it was worth the effort from a strictly learning perspective. I was able to, in a couple of weeks, design and print my own 3D parts, not just print something I downloaded but actually design and print working components.
If I hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have started this blog, something I still and will probably always regret doing.
It gave me at least 2 projects I’m working on to support the printer. A remote power switch and a wireless remote light I can remotely turn on when I start a print. Because, you know, I’m a dick and keep my printer in a closet like a ……… family-friendly Mark.
I haven’t printed anything in a little while but I have a couple of things I need to do. I found files to print a Picard from Star Trek NG doing a face palm. With all the stupid things I did on this last project, I thought I’d print that and put it in a place of prominance to reminde me to think things through.
I also have a couple of projects I need to print stuff for. The light I mentioned above. And something to use these crazy strong magnets I bought on a whim and I’d like to try using 3D scanning to scan something and print it.