This is a seriously nerdy #3dprinting question, that I initially asked in the #klipper discord. @reprapryn maybe you've thought of trying something similar for a flying extruder at some point?
I want to do something better than I have so far for a professional printer I'm building. It's a large format delta, and I want to have a webcam hooked up to Obico for failure detection. Now if I put the webcam at a fixed location on the printer, the failures can be either obscured by the print itself, or the print head. So to remedy that I want to slave the camera on an extra stepper to be at the same height as the print head. But I'm not sure how I'd make it so that a G1 Z<whatever height> activates both the A/B/C motors to move the print head, as well as the U axis that I'm thinking about creating for this. Would this be a macro, or is there some better way of achieving my goal?
This will be using the #recore board from http://iagent.no for this (A7 boards should be available next month from what I know)
Klipper allows a manual stepper to be used independently of the kinematic system so shouldn't be too onerous using some example macros from this guy
https://github.com/jschuh/klipper-macros/blob/main/layers.cfg
Looking at his code, you could write a macro to increment the camera axis up at each layer change and then call it in his layer change code. Doing it this way would allow you to do Z hop without the camera freaking out.
@goeland86 I have been interested in this for a sort of live Z adjust feature for rotary and prismatic deltas to allow the bed to move using a scissor lift stage. Doesn't have to be fast as it only triggers off every 50mm, adjusts the z offset, and continues where it left off. Isn't connected to the kinematics so system doesn't care.
@reprapryn yeah I was wondering about doing that. But at the same time the macro system for this means that if I'm manually jogging the toolhead around I may not see what the toolhead is doing if the camera's down at the bed level while the toolhead's above the field of view...
While the z-hop would make the camera jump with it, I figured it wouldn't be that bad of an issue since it would keep the nozzle in focus as your reference point for the height... Also Obico only takes a snapshot every 10s for analysis.