[Making Time Lapse Videos with the Ultimaker 3]

@PeteG and @Harry Plotter, Thanks for helping the newbies with using Python and for figuring out how to get everything set up on Windows. Sorry I could not respond earlier. I have not tested this on a Windows machine myself.

 

I'd just like to point out that there is no need to have Cura connected, running, or even installed on your computer in order for this script to work. It is completely independent.

 

@Marco_TvM, it would be useful if there was a way to trigger a snapshot whenever a layer change happens. This would make the videos appear much smoother since you would not see the bed constantly moving up and down.

[Making Time Lapse Videos with the Ultimaker 3]

That is true. I think I fixed it, but if not I will just disable those functions as you said.

[Making Time Lapse Videos with the Ultimaker 3]

Thanks, @tinkergnome!

Yes, the problem is line 58 in um3api.py. For some reason os.getlogin() does not work on my Linux systems, so I had to change it to use pwd.

 

>>> os.getlogin()Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

 

Do you know of a more platform agnostic method?

[Making Time Lapse Videos with the Ultimaker 3]

Hi Everyone. I wanted to share a little python script I wrote for making time lapse videos with the onboard camera on the Ultimaker 3. Here is an example from a rather messy print I just did.

Get it on GitHub.

There's probably a lot of generic webcam tools for doing this already, but this one is nice because it doesn't start taking pictures until the printer begins printing, and it stops once the print is completed.

The script requires Python 3 and FFmpeg.

 

Usage

 

$ ./timelapse.py HOST DELAY OUTFILE

 

HOST is the IP address of your Ultimaker 3. You can find this through the menu by going to System > Network > Connection Status.

DELAY is the time between snapshots in seconds. You'll probably want to figure this out based on how long your print will take and how long you want the video to be. For example, if I want a 10 second video at 30 fps, that will be 300 frames. If the print will take five hours, then 5 hours / 300 frames = 60 seconds between frames.

OUTFILE is the name of the video file you want to make. It will be encoded using H.264 at 30 FPS. You can choose any container format you want, but I recommend either .mkv or .mp4.