Upcycling an Old 3D Printer as a Robotic Camera Rig

Good maker YouTube videos rely on quality visuals. Amazing projects alone won’t bring success and a creator also needs stellar presentation to get those sweet, sweet views. But capturing amazing b-roll video is a lot harder than it might seem, which is why most of us are so bad at it. One key to a good video is dynamic movement and robots are good that. That fact led Ben of the Ben Makes Everything YouTube channel to this project in which he upcycled an old 3D printer as a robotic camera rig.

3D printers are absolutely robots by every objective definition. And in fact, older entry-level 3D printers, like Ben’s Creality Ender 3, are about the most affordable robots you can find. Even better, they’re packed with useful components that are easy to control. In this case, Ben just needed to reassemble all of those components into a new orientation to achieve the dynamic movements he wanted.

As I did with my own CamRo project, Ben recognized that a robotic camera operator doesn’t actually need to move in many axes, because a lot of the dynamism of a shot can be added in the editing phase with transforms. So, the four stepper motors of the 3D printer (X, Y, Z, and extruder) were more than enough for the job. One motor rotates a turntable, another moves the camera closer to and further from that turntable, another moves the camera up and down, and the last tilts the camera up and down to keep the subject on the turntable in frame.

But there was one exception: the turntable motor. The stepper motor from the 3D printer struggled to rotate that with heavy subjects on board, so Ben switched it out for a new stepper with an integrated 5:1 gearbox.

Most of the rest of the build was all about shifting around the frame components and designing new mechanical parts to suit the revised layout. Fortunately, Ben was able to reuse many of the frame parts and almost all of the electronic components. That includes the original Creality Ender 3 controller board, which is obviously capable of handling the steppers. Even the screen and control knob worked just fine. Ben simply reconfigured the Marlin firmware to suit the new layout. Some Python scripts help to generate G-code to feed to the robot.

This works great for recording beautiful product (or project) shots, but it is also ideal for photogrammetry 3D scanning. Photogrammetry works by using data from a whole bunch of photos taken from different angles and Ben’s robot can snap all of those automatically. Now he can make even better YouTube videos and do some 3D scanning as a bonus.