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Version: 2026.8.1

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. The camera choice is really a choice about your print host and detector, covered in Digital fabrication.

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. 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 in the printer modal, no extra camera to buy. The frame comes over the printer's own LAN, so you enable LAN access on the connection (host and access code) first, and if Cobblr cannot reach that network itself it rides your edge bridge.

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). 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.