3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: or [email protected]
There are CAD communities available at: [email protected] or [email protected]
Rules
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No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
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Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
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No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
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No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
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Do not create links to reddit
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If you see an issue please flag it
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No guns
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No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe/ may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is 
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Well, in my case, I just bolted an el-cheapo supermarket-bought webcam inside the printer's enclosure. It's terrible in every way: it has fixed focus and the bed of the printer isn't in the focus plane, it has terrible rolling shutter and no manual exposure control.
The webcam is connected to one of the production servers nearby that serves up the video as a MJPEG stream using Motion. It's Motion that limits the framerate to 2 fps, and I configured it that way on purpose: I just need the camera to know whether something terrible has happened to the print and I should stop it remotely - like parts lifting or coming fully unstuck from the sheet, extruder collision... I don't need quality video for that, so I chose the low framerate and poor resolution primarily to save bandwidth on my home internet, which is kind of crap because I live deep in the forest 🙂
It's a bit complicated to explain, but to make it simple: the top parts are optical couplers. They have a slot and a dovetailed circular rail inside that you can't see because it's buried in the support. The bottom parts are shutters that ride in the rail and block off more or less of the light in the side of the couplers that has the rail, and have a lever on the other side. The side parts are just mounting clips to hold the couplers onto the optical measurement instruments they're meant to be mounted on.
Those parts cost cents to make and work just as good as multi-hundred dollar professional optical attenuators, and they're a lot more convenient for a quick manual adjustment that doesn't require a precise number of decibels of attenuation.
Finished print 🙂