IMO having some kind of a camera on a 3D printer is a must, for remote monitoring of print progress so one can check in on how a print is progressing, and intervene if need be in the event of a failure. On the Prusas I came up with a kind of elaborate setup based on
Sneaks' articulating arm, mounted to the X motor so the camera rises with the print, and with the ribbon cable for the pi camera in a drag chain between the arm and the pi case. As I did when I got the first Prusa, I had been using a standard baby monitor for this, but I wanted to use the built in camera support in the Klipper firmware.
This wasn't going to work (at least not easily) on the Voron due to the nature of the flying gantry, the additional resonance mounting a camera to it would entail (mainly due to the higher print speeds), and the difficulty in running cables cleanly. Some people have managed to mount a camera internally in the enclosure and not on the gantry, but there's not a lot of room, and just for simplicity's sake I opted to mount a cheap USB webcam on the outside of the case, looking in through one of the clear acrylic side panels. I am not interested in recording timelapses, so good enough is good enough in this application.
As a first step, I added a USB receptacle to one of the previously blanked off keystone ports on the rear skirt of the machine, and then routed a 2' USB cable from that to the Raspberry Pi in the electronics bay, through the existing cable raceways. This allows me to plug in and unplug the camera without needing to access the electronics bay. To mount the camera, I went with the basic articulating arm again, and had to hunt around a bit to find an adapter that would work with the way the Voron mounts the enclosure panels to the frame since the standard mount for 2020 extrusions won't fit with the enclosure panels installed. As I did with the ribbon cables, I designed and printed a custom standoff to allow the cable to be cleanly secured to the arm. All that remains is to print some clips I found to route the cable along the frame to the back.
Here is the webcam mounted to the printer showing the articulating arm. I haven't done anything for cable management yet in this picture.
These are the standoffs I made, showing how they secure the cable to the arm, while preventing it from getting kinked by the zip ties.
USB cable routed along the arm. I only put the standoffs at every other link on the arm.
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