Cameras
Cameras in Cobblr are for watching a print and catching failures. As with everything else, Cobblr doesn't connect to the camera directly: it shows the stream your print manager already serves, and it runs failure detection through a detector.
Camera watching lives inside the Digital Fabrication module, which ships as Experimental. See the status note at the top of Digital fabrication for what that means.
What to buy
- Any UVC USB webcam works once it's plugged into your OctoPrint or Klipper host, since the manager serves the stream and Cobblr consumes it.
- A Raspberry Pi camera on the print-server Pi is the common OctoPrint setup.
- A Bambu printer's built-in chamber camera shows over the LAN, in the printer modal, with nothing extra to buy.
The camera choice is really a choice about your print host and detector, covered in Digital fabrication.
How it works
The camera is wired to your printer's host or manager, not to Cobblr. OctoPrint, Klipper (Mainsail/Fluidd), and friends serve a webcam stream (MJPEG or HLS), and Cobblr displays that stream on the printer and can point a detector at it.
A detector is what actually decides good-versus-failed:
- PrintGuard or Obico pull the camera themselves and return a verdict.
- AI vision scores a frame with your own vision model.
- When the detector cannot reach the camera but Cobblr can, PrintGuard's send-frames mode or the edge bridge relays frames out.