Skip to main content

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.

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.

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 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.