How would you recommend to setup Camera?
Having been going back and forth on this, but I can't find a clean way to add a camera to my Prusa Mini.
All the hardware is already here, but dunno what's the route to take.
Hardware available:
USB endoscope camera is already mounted to the fan
Pi camera is mounted to the x-axis motor.
Neither camera is currently working though.
I have a Pi 2, Pi 3, Pi 4, Pi zero's and various ESPs as dev boards, as well as a Beelink Mini PC running Proxmox.
My Creality printer is already connected to a Pi 3 running Octoprint and a USB camera, but for the Prusa Mini, I'd prefer to just use Prusa Connect, since the integration into PrusaSlicer and the Prusa App is quite convenient.
Ideally, I'd connect the endoscope camera to the USB port of the Mini, but that doesn't seem to work.
So do I have to spin up a PrusaLink instance on my Proxmox server and connect both the Mini and the endoscope camera to the proxmox server?
Run another Pi and attach it to the Mini, which is just used to provide the camera feed?
Any recommendations on how to set this up?
Prusa Mini FW6.2.4
RE:
>So do I have to spin up a PrusaLink instance on my Proxmox server and connect both the Mini and the endoscope camera to the proxmox server?
no, this does not work with devices which have embedded PrusaLink into a firmware (mini, mk4, core, xl)
I would recommend using my script to capture camera image and forward it to Prusa Connect https://nvtkaszpir.github.io/prusa-connect-camera-script/
Few options to consider:
- standalone esp32 camera + prusa-connect-camera-script in container on host/container in vm or script on host/vm, where host can can be proxmox or rpi
- camera on usb connected to rpi/host/vm-usb-passthrough with mediamtx + prusa-connect-camera-script on the same host or different host (or in container)
Both options provide local video streaming (though esp32 will lag when taking a snapshot) and provide an option to send image once in a while to Prusa Connect.
Pi 2 might be too old/too slow for higher resolutions, haven't tried it, but knowning that Pi Zero can do it then who knows.
If you want to run two cameras I would suggest Pi 3 with mediamtx + two instances of prusa-connect-camera-script containers (one for each cam).
That would allow local streaming / recording and snapshots to Prusa Connect and the device should not sweat if you stick to the camera defaults (most cams are mjpeg)
See my GitHub and printables.com for some 3d stuff that you may like.