Help me test Octolapse V0.4.0rc1.dev0!

Plugins Octolapse
1

dev0

After over 9 months of sweat and tears (no blood thankfully), Octolapse V0.4.0rc1.dev0 has been released and is ready for testing!

You can find information about the release, including a fairly comprehensive list of all of the new features, here.

You can find a beta installation guide here. It needs a lot of work, but I think the skill level on this site is high enough for it to be good enough :slight_smile: I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions you have for the guide. Since I know the new version so well, it's a bit difficult for me to figure out what's important for users of previous versions to know. And it's down right impossible for me to understand a complete newcomer's perspective.

Please report any feedback here. Problems, suggestions, thoughts, feelings, or even just a simple message letting me know you have tried to install it are welcome! Feedback is absolutely critical to getting things ready for a production release.

If history serves as a guide, I will be totally inundated with support requests over the next few days, so I apologize in advance if I'm a bit slower than usual to respond. However, this is exactly the goal, since reporting a few issues now will prevent those issues from percolating up to the stable release, saving me lots of time and headaches. If you have critical issues that prevent you from printing, simply disable Octolapse, and I'll try my best to solve your issue ASAP.

Anyway, thanks in advance for any and all help, and, as always, happy OctoPrinting!

2 Likes
2

Hey. Thanks for this. I installed it. I haven't run any prints yet, but I see a couple things in the settings that might need tweaking. I have a Logitech C920.In the webcam settings, I set the exposure to manual. Well, I put the gain down to zero, and I cranked the exposure all the way up, and it still seems pretty dark. Previously, I had only had to put the exposure up to around 1600. Now I actually have to turn the gain up a little to clearly see the image.

Another thing is that the focus slider uses multiples of 5. I actually prefer to finetune it further than that. I'm thinking that there are others that would want that. I mean focus goes from 0 to 250, and it's in multiples of 5, but exposure goes up to 2057 and I can fine tune to whatever exact number I want. Just a few minor things that I see.
Again, thanks for this.

3

Thanks for your reply! Regarding the gain/exposure, as far as response time goes, you're better off increasing the gain and decreasing the exposure. Obviously at some point the image will appear washed out if you crank the gain too high, so it is a balancing act. The settings themselves should respond the same way in this version of Octolapse as they did in the last one, so I don't understand why your current settings would need to be different unless the lighting around your printer is a bit lower than it was before, but some kind of bug is always possible. Your best bet would be to go to the http://ADDRESS_OF_PI/webcam/control.htm page and enter your settings in there to see if there is a difference. Octolapse uses this page to send the settings to mjpg-streamer, so the results should be identical. However, keep in mind that the values shown on the control.htm page do NOT necessarily reflect the current camera settings, so make sure you enter both exposure AND gain into control.hml (not just one or the other).

Regarding the focus, I double checked input.json for my camera and I see the following at http://IP_OF_PI/webcam/input.json for the focus control:

{
"name": "Focus (absolute)",
"id": "10094858",
"type": "1",
"min": "0",
"max": "250",
"step": "5",
"default": "0",
"value": "30",
"dest": "0",
"flags": "0",
"group": "1"
},

As you can see the minimum step value is 5, meaning the camera will not respond to smaller changes than this. If you want to test it out, try going to control.htm and see if smaller increments make a difference. You could also check your input.json file (using the address above) and see if your values are different. Octolapse should recognize the json values and adjust the controls according to that, but, if it DOES actually respond to smaller increments, I could (and will) customize the control page to allow these smaller increments, but first I need to know if Octolapse is already detecting a custom camera. Can you let me know if Octolapse is detecting a custom page by looking at this button:

image
image.png1102×165 43.1 KB

If it says 'Switch to Default Page' that means you are using the custom page (which is good!). If it says 'Check for Custom Page' click it and see if one can be found (if not you will see an error message popup). I'm not sure how many logitech cameras are compatible with the custom page (depends entirely on the input.json file), and in any case it will be very helpful if I know which ones work!

Other than these two issues, what do you think about the new camera controls?

THANK YOU for your feedback.

4

Thanks. All this makes sense. I guess the focus changes I was making before might have been a placebo :slight_smile:
But I don't know why the exposure is that way though.

And these new settings are working out great. I had actually made a post on Reddit about using Octolapse the same way as the built in timelapse in that I just wanted a picture every x seconds without interrupting the print at all, and I feel like this version definitely does that. The only thing is that I have it set to take a picture every 10 seconds. But, I think it stops taking pictures as soon as the print is done. So the last picture is taken when the nozzle still on the print, and you usually can't see the full print. I think that when it's on that setting, there should be an option to have it take x number of shots after print is complete to give the nozzle time to move to its final position.

5

There is a new option within the rendering settings that lets you remove the first or last N frames. Maybe remove the last one so that it ends up with a clear view of the print?

6

I could be wrong, but If I remove the last frame, then the last picture would still be while it's printing. I just need one about 20 seconds after printing completes.

7

Sorry, I misunderstood you.

Two solutions come to mind:

  1. Add the ability of mixing the gcode trigger with any other trigger (smart triggers included). That way you could add a snap command anywhere in your start/end gcode, even in the OctoPrint start/end gcode!
  2. Add an option to take a picture after the print ends completely. You can add multiple frames easily already using the post-roll rendering setting, so it's not necessary to add the 'N' snapshots variable.

What do you think?

1 Like
8

I think both of those might be handy features for a lot of people. But definitely option 2 for me.