3D Printing Timelapse Rig

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I have enjoyed creating all the timelapse shots recently, Octolapse is a great addition to Octoprint making it easy to create amazing shots. Once I dealt with my lighting and white balance issues I started to look at my video process. The print bed lowers on my machine so, with a static camera, the 3D print has to start at the top of the screen and fill into the lower half. I preferred a video where the print started in the middle of the screen. A mechanical solution to keep the print in the middle of the screen seemed to be the easiest solution. I made a video about it as well as this blog post, if you like it please subscribe and I'll make more videos.



The design is relatively simple, the camera is still mounted to the top of the frame but an arm extends from the camera rig out under the print bed. As the bed descends the arm is pushed downwards and this motion is used to tilt the camera downwards. On it's own this would have the effect of making the print start at the bottom and grow upwards. The camera is mounted in the middle of a gear ratio between the arm and the static part of the rig, this means that the camera position only tilts down a fraction of the angle that the arm tilts. Initially this was 1:1 so the camera moved half the distance but this was increased empirically to get a more favourable movement. The end result is that the print starts in the middle of the video and grows towards the top and bottom of the image at the same time.



STL files for the time lapse rig can be downloaded from here

The Onshape workspace can be found here








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