I noticed that the camera on this printer is not that great, the image quality is pretty bad, lot of noise, and the exposure is all over the place. I tried to mess around with Crowsnest settings, but I can only make it worse.
Also, the framerate is not constant, sometimes it is locked at 15fps (even if it’s set to 30 in Mainsail settings), but most of the time it stutters like crazy, going down to 3 and then back to 30 or even giving me the error “connection lost”
The printer is 2 meters away from the access point, has a 130 Mbps connection, and I also added an external wifi antenna instead of the internal one, so it’s not a connection problem. IMHO, the Host CPU can’t keep up or the camera is just bad.
So my question is: how can I fix this, or what camera can I use to replace the stock one?
I agree that the CPU is the bottle neck. You’ve piled on more load than the machine was designed for. Mainline + USB eddy + EddyNG… All add CPU load.
Set the frame rate at 5FPS (Perhaps even3). Stuffing the buffer with frames at 30FPS is never going to work and gives the CPU no chance.
There are USB cameras that do the compression in hardware before sending it on to the CPU which would reduce the CPU load and allow higher frame rates. Which ones? I’m not sure.
Try increasing the amount of available light. It’s possible the problem is because the viewed area is too dark for the camera which results in it having to incease gain resulting in more noise and a longer exposure which in turn results in the exposure times being longer than the target frame rate would allow.
Good replies. I’d add that the potato-cam on the SV08 is never going to make a good quality time lapse video for YouTube and is only useful for remotely monitoring the printer’s status for detecting failed prints but you can take some of the load off the processor so it can send more image frames (the low priority task) by commenting out all references to Obico in printer.cfg if you aren’t managing your SV08 with your phone. Disabling Obico might also help to avoid the dreaded Timer Too Close error in Klipper.
I switched to Mainline Klipper because I use the BTT Eddy probe, so I don’t have any Obico config or addon, but I have Mobileraker since I monitor my printer through my phone and Home Assistant. The fact is that this problem was present even right after I finished installing Klipper before all my addons and customizations.
As for the light, the printer has its own LED always on and maxed out, but even with both printer lights and room lights (2500 lm LED lamp) it still performs like crap.
I’d love to integrate a camera from another printer like the Elegoo or Qidi, but I don’t know if it would be compatible, and mountable on the gantry of the SV0/8
USB cameras are relatively inexpensive. It shouldn’t be difficult to swap for a better camera to see if it’s going to work and if so, then devise a method of mounting it.
3D printer manufacturers cheap out on the camera when the difference in cost for a good camera is minimal and most users would gladly pay the difference. A good camera on a 3D printer is so rare that reviewers make note of it. Then again, extreme cost reduction is true of many items on the cost reduced bill of materials and if each cost $5 to $10 more at the bulk purchased manufacturer’s level, the retail price would increase substantially.