Hi Folks,
I thought buying a good quality webcam for each of the raspberry pi’s we just approved would be a good idea. This would give us the following benefits:
a) Members can keep a closer eye on their print without having to go back and forth between digifab and wherever they’re working.
b) It will allow us to keep better track of the state of the printers.
c) We can make some cool time lapse videos of members printing things.
d) It will improve accountability for members respecting the printers and keeping things clean as we can set it up to send a snapshot into discord when a print starts/ends.
I’ve got a Logitech C920 at home. It’s good image quality for the price and plugs right into OctoPrint out of the box. I propose we buy 3x Logitech C920 webcams to attach to the OctoPrint Pi’s on each printer. They’re $99 each from umart so a budget of $300 will cover them. I’ve included below a screenshot from my octoprint interface so you can see what it looks like (there’s many better ways to mount it than that pic fwiw).
To go with these, I’d also like us to buy some LED lighting to properly light the areas around the printers to make it easier to see your print and do maintenance, etc. I propose a $10 budget for a pack of these LED strips. We can use one of the many 12v PSUs around the space to power them.
Not important, just whenever we have a meeting next.