3-Point Levelling Bed Handle with Raspberry Pi Camera Mount

prusaprinters

Installing a 3-point bed-levelling solution helped me level the bed faster, but it also removed one of the two bed screws that I used to hold on my Ender 3 Bed Handle with its integrated Articulating Raspberry Pi Camera installation.I tried just living with having to install a screw specific to that handle, but it got in my way when reaching under the bed to adjust the level. Fortunately, gulfcoast_robotics has incorporated additional tapped screw holes for mounting their own bed handle designAll I had to do was pull their handle model and mine into 3D Builder, cut the mounting post off mine and merge it into theirs. The result is a handle with a post onto which I can mount my articulating camera mount, which can be downloaded from thing 3850321Print SettingsPrinter Brand:CrealityPrinter: Ender 3Rafts:NoSupports: NoResolution:0.20Infill: 20%Filament: CCTree PETG Black Notes: I actually printed with 80% infill, because I forgot to change it from a previous print. 20% should be plenty.I had some blistering on the top of my handle, probably because of the high nozzle temperature (230) and the slow printing speed (25mm/s). Not worth printing all over again, but you may want to take note and reduce the extruder temp for the final couple of layers.NOTES:Other elements of my Pi Camera installationSince the camera travels with the bed, the cable connecting the camera to the Pi needs to be long enough to allow unrestricted Y-axis movement. In my case, the Pi is mounted in a box underneath the LCD. I use a 50cm cable, which I bought from Amazon.NOTE: You will see in the photo that I put a twist into the camera cable, to stop it from getting trapped in the Y-axis belt pulley. My first one got pinched, shorted something in the Pi camera processing circuit, and forced me to replace both cable and Pi.The "box" in which I mounted my Pi is this one., except that I did not make the camera mount that came with that design, preferring to just pass the cable out between the box and the rail on the camera-side of the box and to mount the camera to the bed handle.I have tried mounting this camera in 3 different positions now: 1. fixed to the X axis, 2. fixed to the Y-axis and 3. fixed to the frame. Of these 3, my personal preference is fixed to the Y-axis. The camera tries to auto-focus, so when the subject keeps moving toward or away from the camera, the image is constantly going in and out of focus. Fixing to the Y-axis solves that problem, at the cost of managing the moving cable.Updates22March 2020: Disappointed by the blisters on the top of the handle, I decided to add a thin cover. I used Fusion360 to copy a slice off the top of the handle, shrank it a bit to follow the same contours but leave a black border, and the result is the two-tone version in the photo.I am liking the effect so much, I am adding silky green covers to the slots of the aluminum rails and to the extruder cable chain.I have uploaded the STL file for this mod, here, as Top.stl.     Category: 3D Printer Accessories