Octolapse: Can never get it to take snapshots

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1

Ok, let me preface this by saying I'm new to 3D printing. I've been at it about a week so far, quite enjoying it. Now to the issue.

I cannot, for the life of me, get Octolapse to actually take any shots to make a timelapse. I've gone through every guide and video on setup and config that I can find, added the Gcode changes, set Octolapse to absolute, manually set the home positions for all 3 axes, everything I could find. I've completely wiped and reinstalled Octoprint and Octolapse fresh and still nothing. I either have to be doing something dumb, or I'm blind and I'm completely missing something obvious.

I am running a Pi 3B+ with an ArduCam OV5647, an Elegoo Neptune 2 (with their 'branded' Cura 4.8, I should probably switch), Octoprint 1.6.1, Octolapse 0.4.1, OctoPi 0.18.0. Everything else works perfectly fine, stream shows up, built-in timelapse works, all the tests in octolapse come back as good (although the Custom Image Preferences worked a grand total of once, and now won't work again at all, even after a fresh wipe/install of everything and editing the octopi.txt file)

The issue when I look at the Octolapse log is as follows:

"2021-08-31 14:22:12,212 - octolapse.timelapse - ERROR - The snapshot plan position (gcode number: 2477, gcode:G1 F2100 X92 Y123.118 E163.5108, line number: 2507) does not match the actual position (gcode number: 2477, gcode: G1 X112.898 Y109.94 E154.65995)!  Aborting Snapshot, moving to next plan."

It's always the positioning. I've searched for a few days now for a fix that works and nothing has, no matter what settings I change.

As for my start Gcode, this is all stock other than adding the G90 and M82 at the start as that was one of the suggestions I found.

G90 ;absolute
M82 ;extruder absolute
G28 ;home
G92 E0 ;Reset Extruder
G1 Z4.0 F3000 ;Move Z Axis up
G92 E0 ;Reset Extruder
G1 X1.1 Y20 Z0.28 F5000.0 ;Move to start position
G1 X1.1 Y200.0 Z0.28 F1500.0 E15 ;Draw the first line
G1 X1.4 Y200.0 Z0.28 F5000.0 ;Move to side a little
G1 X1.4 Y20 Z0.28 F1500.0 E30 ;Draw the second line
G92 E0 ;Reset Extruder
G1 Z2.0 F3000 ;Move Z Axis up

I'm not sure what all logs would be needed but the Octolapse log is just a wall of the timelapse errors for positioning. If there are any specific logs I should pull, please let me know. (I am mid-print so I'll have to grab them afterward).

Any help is gladly appreciated as this has been my biggest headache for the last week. Everything has been printing great, but I can't make good timelapses!

2

Have you tried changing the triggers to different ones, maybe ones that don't depend on the position? Just to see if you can get it to take some snapshots?

3

I have not, I'll try that this morning and see if I luck out.

4

Ok, so first, I'm dumb apparently. Second, THANK YOU for telling me to try a different trigger option. I started a print a little bit ago using the "Classic - Every Layer" trigger, and so far it seems to be working and taking the snaps after moving the extruder out of the way like I want it to.

I was using the "Smart - Compatibility" trigger before and that was the one giving me no luck. So now I play with settings to get clean timelapses.

Again, thank you for the fix! Can't believe I was just being dumb by not trying a different trigger...

5

Some of them require more setting up, extra configuration in the slicer etc. so it can be a bit of an experiment. The help links in OctoLapse are usually pretty good, but there's also the wiki that might help as well - if you haven't checked already.

6

Thanks! I'll be keeping that as a pinned tab now. After finishing another print, I have come to the realization that I shouldn't have cheaped out on a camera. It works well enough, and I may continue to use it for monitoring, but for getting nice a quality image for timelapses, it's sorely lacking. Testing it with a USB camera I have now.

7

Make sure you've adjusted the settings for the streamer - on OctoPi it defaults to quite a low resolution (640x480 iirc).