Good maker YouTube movies depend on high quality visuals. Superb tasks alone gained’t deliver success and a creator additionally wants stellar presentation to get these candy, candy views. However capturing superb b-roll video is loads tougher than it may appear, which is why most of us are so unhealthy at it. One key to a very good video is dynamic motion and robots are good that. That truth led Ben of the Ben Makes Every little thing YouTube channel to this mission during which he upcycled an outdated 3D printer as a robotic digital camera rig.
3D printers are completely robots by each goal definition. And actually, older entry-level 3D printers, like Ben’s Creality Ender 3, are about probably the most inexpensive robots you could find. Even higher, they’re filled with helpful parts which are straightforward to regulate. On this case, Ben simply wanted to reassemble all of these parts into a brand new orientation to realize the dynamic actions he needed.
As I did with my personal CamRo mission, Ben acknowledged {that a} robotic digital camera operator doesn’t really want to maneuver in lots of axes, as a result of a variety of the dynamism of a shot could be added within the enhancing part with transforms. So, the 4 stepper motors of the 3D printer (X, Y, Z, and extruder) had been greater than sufficient for the job. One motor rotates a turntable, one other strikes the digital camera nearer to and farther from that turntable, one other strikes the digital camera up and down, and the final tilts the digital camera up and all the way down to hold the topic on the turntable in body.
However there was one exception: the turntable motor. The stepper motor from the 3D printer struggled to rotate that with heavy topics on board, so Ben switched it out for a brand new stepper with an built-in 5:1 gearbox.
Many of the remainder of the construct was all about shifting across the body parts and designing new mechanical elements to go well with the revised format. Fortuitously, Ben was in a position to reuse most of the body elements and virtually all the digital parts. That features the unique Creality Ender 3 controller board, which is clearly able to dealing with the steppers. Even the display screen and management knob labored simply wonderful. Ben merely reconfigured the Marlin firmware to go well with the brand new format. Some Python scripts assist to generate g-code to feed to the robotic.
This works nice for recording lovely product (or mission) photographs, however it’s also ideally suited for photogrammetry 3D scanning. Photogrammetry works through the use of information from a complete bunch of images taken from completely different angles and Ben’s robotic can snap all of these mechanically. Now he could make even higher YouTube movies and do some 3D scanning as a bonus.
