in this video i'm going to show you how to upgrade your 3d printing time lapses from
looking like this to this by just using some small 3d printed parts and a trigger
release system if you're anything like me you absolutely love seeing these 3d printing time
lapses where you just see this model grow from the bed and it's actually pretty simple to do
all they're doing there is they're basically getting the camera to take a picture between every
single layer change now there's many ways of doing this you can go ahead and wire something straight
into the perfect limit switch position or you can go ahead and use octoprint but i wanted something
very simple physical almost fullproof and this is why i'm gonna go with a trigger release system
so what exactly do you need to make this work well you need your 3d printer of course you need
a camera and you need a trigger release system now your camera can be a phone because there are
bluetooth and wired trigger release systems and of course if you have a separate camera out and about
you're gonna have to find your own trigger release some of them are wireless some of them are wired
but they're all pretty simple now that we know what we need when you figure out how to go ahead
and place our trigger release system close enough to our 3d print head that when it goes over to it
it doesn't smash into it but also close enough that it doesn't lose 3d printing space now over
on my cr-10s i have these two bolts perfectly positioned to go ahead and model something up
to hold my trigger so right there i went ahead and modeled this up if you want to see how i went
ahead and model this within blender i have a link down in the description now your printer might not
have a perfect spot like this might not have a place to go ahead and put a permanent fixture
to go ahead and do 3d prints well for that i would advise using a friction arm now friction arms are
pretty interesting because they can move in any sort of way but they have this lovely little
tight thing you can go ahead and tighten it up and now it will no longer move now do keep in
mind that adding a friction arm directly onto the z axis is probably not the best thing out
there because this is going to go ahead and add a whole bunch of weight onto one side of the z-axis
i can't guarantee the results that you're going to get there so i would really advise that you try
and find the perfect spot for a little fixture or maybe if you have t slot aluminum on your
3d printer maybe go ahead and create something that fits within that t-slot aluminum right there
so now that i have this bracket in place you can see that i'm just a couple of millimeters away
from actually being able to trigger it so what i go ahead here is i model this teeny tiny little
cone thing that i can just go ahead and super glue onto my trigger now i went ahead and used
a bit of accelerant with my super glue even though knowing it's got some acetone in it so it did melt
the pla a little bit but a little bit of sharpie and that fixes everything up okay now we're pretty
much at the home stretch but we're about to go ahead and tackle something that i'm a little bit
scared to mention g-code now i do mean this a huge word of warning here we're about to go into g-code
and g-code is a very quick and easy way to break your 3d printer please please please
do not just copy and paste g-code in to your 3d print commands and understand
what's going on i'm going to do my absolute best to show you the g-code that i use for my cr-10s
and then you can go ahead and learn from this and then do some baby tests to go ahead and figure
out exactly what's going on here because when i first did this i almost broke my 3d printer i felt
like going ahead and scraping my nozzle across my glass and also across my steel clips wrecking two
of my brass nozzles anyway with that huge word of warning out of the way let's go ahead and
jump into the g code so here we are within my slicer of choice which is prusa slicer now if
you don't have prusa slicer and you have use a different slicer i'm sure quick googling
of custom g code within your slicer is going to show you a solution but here we are within prusa
and this is the g code that we need to put in i'm going to go over to printer settings and
here where it says custom g code here is where you're going to go ahead and put it in you can
put it in the before layer change gcode but i've gone for the after layer change as there is pretty
much where i'm getting my best results so let's go ahead and take a look at the code so here it
is first let's do a little bit of uh learning what the g code is so first of all we've got a
g91 which means use relative position so the best way to explain this is basically if the 3d printer
is right here and i say move 10 millimeters on the x is going to move 10 millimeters on the x however
if you have it in absolute position mode and you say hey go to x10 instead of moving 10 millimeters
it's going to go where x equals 10. i hope that makes sense then we have a g1 which means move and
a g4 which means weight and this here is the code that we have so first and foremost we go ahead
into our relative position mode and we do a g1 on our e which is our extruder -8 f two thousand
which means retract minus eight millimeters at two thousand millimeters a minute so we're
doing a great big retraction to make sure that we don't get any blobs left or any stringing going on
then i go ahead and do another move on our z so we've got g1 z2 at the same speed going upwards
making sure that our printer is well out the way before we do any movement then we're going to go
back into our absolute position mode and don't worry about these numbers right this minute
because i'm going to show you how i went about getting these numbers after we go through the code
so we're going to go and move our head so our x our x gantry that has our extruder all the
way to the right you might have to be going to the left it all depends on your 3d printer but
as you see this is a new one to us this is our f i'm going by the travel speed that i've already
designated and timesing that by 60 so 60 times our travel speed so i'm moving that all the way to the
right and then i'm doing the same to our y which is the bed and that's it now be careful if you can
put these in the wrong order and that's how i went ahead and dragged my printer head right across my
clips so big word of warning there just be careful here that is where a lot of problems can happen
very quickly and those have you seen that i haven't gone all the way to the right here i
haven't i've got close and that's due to the acceleration and we'll talk about that in a little
moment so then i do a g4 to wait and make sure that the movement up above is done and then here
we do another g1 on the x just five millimeters so we're getting ready to press the trigger
now here's the key thing i'm doing this very slowly and the reason why is due to acceleration
and jerk you can overshoot this and the first time i had this i had this go straight to 305 and i was
overshooting my 305 every single time i'm smashing straight into my trigger so be careful there stop
first then move a little bit then wait for that movement to be done that's that's g4 here and
then do one more to just go and move that last little millimeter to go ahead and trigger your
shutter release system then we're going to do a g4 p200 which means wait for 0.2 of a second
then we're going to do a g1 and go back off the trigger to let release the trigger and then we're
doing a wait we're waiting for 1.5 seconds to make sure that the picture is taken with
nothing moving then we're going back into our relative position bringing the z-axis back down so
it's getting ready to print and then we do a g90 to return to the absolute position now the keynote
of you might have realized hey what's going on you did a massive retraction up here and then you
haven't gone ahead and primed the head once again now this is a weird thing i found that for me
i didn't need to re-prime my head and in fact that's how i was getting the best results however
you might need to re-prime your head so you might need to put in something like this which is a
g1 e 7.9 so i'm just saying hey extrude 7.9 so you're right there ready to go at a little bit
of a slower speed getting ready to continue 3d printing but once again this is very much
in your hands to experiment understand what is going on here because this can and will break your
3d printer if you don't understand what is going on i can't stress this enough because i almost
did it three times in this project so true do your test maybe in the middle of the print bed before
you go ahead and commit it to the extremes of your print bed first all right now let's go ahead
and show you how i got my numbers just before i share how i got my trigger position location i'd
love it if you consider subscribing and hitting that bell icon as all i'm doing here on maker
tales is sharing my maker journey to help you go further in yours so to get that exact position
it's relatively simple all i did was auto home my 3d printer so it's at the zero zero zero and then
what i did is i went into my settings moved up my z just a little bit and then moved all the way
along on my x keeping a note of the numbers that were coming up i found that when i got to 305 i
was just just about to hit my trigger then i found that that last little millimeter between 305 and
306 that was actually triggering off my release so that's exactly what i did as you can see within my
code i went to 295 because that is a good distance away that the acceleration wasn't going to go
ahead and smash into the side of it then i move really slowly that last little centimeter and then
i do that last little millimeter and then i pull back and that's it with all those numbers now put
into the g code that's how i went about getting this perfect time lapse set up now
that you have this set up you can go ahead and create great time lapses like these right here
and there you have it that's how to go about creating incredible time lapses of absolutely
anything that you 3d print of course some of you have a couple more questions like how exactly to
turn all these photos into a video how did you do that zoom in thing how do you stabilize the
footage well i use davinci resolve and the short answer is basically within resolve you can import
images and instantly it gets turned into a clip and there there's a lovely stabilize and then i
just use a couple of keyframes on the zooming in and the positioning if you want a video on
this just let me know down in the comments a huge thank you to my patrons you guys are absolutely
awesome and i absolutely love having your support behind me if you think i'm worthy of your support
i would love to see you there too don't forget that we have a discord community
that's linked down in the description thanks for watching keep making and let the quest continue