ninethehacker.xyz 🍔️

One of the true joys of 3d printing is mounting things onto other things, quickly and easily. One of the biggest hassles in videography/cinematography is gaffing. 3d printing has been a boon to my photography. Rapid, secure, simple, and repeatable camera rigs that I could only dream of are now 20mins in CAD and an hour or so to print.

Please let me know if you want to licence any of the .stl files or would like custom mounts designed, cheap prices and I accept cryptocurrency!

phone to tripod adaptor

I finally took the plunge and got a gumtree tripod. It’s a very good one, the issue is that normally you need a camera with a mounting thread. This is an issue as my primary cameras are a gopro and my smartphone.

My process when designing a part is to get dimensions for every other part before I open FreeCAD. The three parts I had to marry up were: the camera shoe on the panhead, an M6 coarse nut that provides much stronger threads than PLA, and the phone itself. I dump all of these dimensions in an engineering notebook:

After that I got on the PC, I’ve compiled the full design phase, a timelapse of the print, and some sample footage I got on my first night in the city testing the thing.

Some notes from the build:

• eyeballing rough dimensions sucks, and I had to manually correct the print with hand tools.
• 8mm was probably overkill, but the rigidity of the completed part is pretty amazing.
• the android camera app is not designed for use with cinematic rigs and smoothing will introduce bounceback.
• whitebalance and shutter are particularly bad, and these settings are baked into the API.
• phone cameras cannot manage low light/high ISO situations.

Fairly impressive results though, I thing it’s a good enough rig for urbex/social media content. Parts definitely come together much faster using profiles in the Part Design toolbox than the CSG stuff I started out with two years ago.

gopro to seat tube adaptor

I thought the seat tube might be a great protected spot to mount a gopro, it turned out that no, there was too much bike in the way. It was still a fun build, and I learned heaps about embedding screws and support material, it’s not even a bad clamp design.

If you’re wondering the dimensions of the standard gopro mounting fork thing they’re in here:

Here’s a clip I got, its not great.

I actually really like the sweeping camera motion though, I’m considering a headset front mount for a tracking shot I want to get.

TPU gopro mount

I don’t have much material on this one, but it was a major challenge. It’s designed to bolt into an M3 drilled plate and provide vibration isolation and some impact resistance to a gopro hero 4. Aligning features on a flexible material is actually surprisingly difficult, food for thought.

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