Finding the best spot to attach the camera
Since the Hephestos 2 has a moving print bed and an arm that moves in the Z axis, I thought the best way to add a cam was to let it move in the Z direction with the extruder arm, pointing in the direction of the red arrow. In this configuration the extruder is always visible, even if large objects are printed.
![](http://www.kinety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/BQ-Hephestos-2-arrow-457x480.jpg)
The BQ Hephestos 2 printer. The camera will replace the yellow cover on the left side (see red arrow).
Recycling a cheap USB webcam
I already had a USB webcam that I wanted to use, a Somikon SXGA with a resolution of 1280×1024 pixels. It features its own light source (6 white LEDs) and a manual focus control. It can be rotated and tilted, and the stand can be removed by unfastening a screw.
Designing the camera mount
To attach the camera to the arm of the Hephestos 2 I designed a custom camera mount that would replace the yellow cover (see red arrow in the first image above).
At first I used 123D Design (a free-of-charge but closed-source 3D creation and editing tool from Autodesk). It’s easy to use, but very limited even for such a simple task. After a lot of frustration (objects wouldn’t line up correctly, chamfers and fillets can’t be changed or deleted etc.) I gave up and googled for a better alternative.
I quickly found numerous recommendations for OpenSCAD, a free software for creating 3D CAD objects using textual description. That’s exactly what I was looking for, being a programmer.
After reading this great tutorial and this cheat sheet I was confident enough to try it out. So I installed OpenSCAD on my mac and created the model for my camera mount in less than an hour. It’s about 20 lines of source code.
![](http://www.kinety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/OpenSCAD-Model-480x336.png)
The camera mount was created in OpenSCAD by combining/subtracting cubes and cylinders programmatically.
The camera mount was created in OpenSCAD by combining/subtracting cubes and cylinders programmatically.
Printing the mount
Printing took around 90 minutes, I used black PLA, 50% infill and standard resolution.
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