OK so I had planned to write a bit about, like, the manufacturing work still to go, and where we are, and what I'm hoping to have done before crowdfunding closes, and then between then and ordering boards, and then between then and boards coming back, and then between then and shipping to Mouser.  I still plan to write that post, but over the weekend, I put together something that I'm super stoked about and I hope you will be too.

I shot and edited this together, and it'll go out in a Crowd Supply update in the next day or so.  But I'm posting it here first because I think it looks insanely good and I can't wait to show it off :)

Since the Crowd Supply post is going to be a little broader in audience, I won't get to say much in terms of command line details there.  But for the Hackaday audience, for those curious, here's what I did:

• I hooked up my a6600 to the Expander, and set it to 1/4s exposure at ISO 1000, put a 55mm lens on the front, and stopped the lens down to f/9.  I focused right on the bed where the part was going to print.
• I then set an X1Plus Action on layer change to pause for a second, pull the shutter GPIO for a half a second, pause for a second again, and then release the G-code interpreter.  The pause was important because the card table I have in my filming space is kind of rickety, and I needed to give the vibrations time to settle down!
• After printing, I had 300 JPEGs or so, each 24MP.  I fed them to FFMPEG to get something I could bring into DaVinci Resolve.  I couldn't use my Mac's hardware codec for this, because it didn't seem to be able to deal with 6000x4000 images!  But x264 did just fine: ffmpeg -framerate 10 -start_number 1394 -i /Volumes/Untitled/DCIM/100MSDCF/DSC%05d.jpg -vf format=yuv420p -r 10 -crf 27 -y timelapse.mp4
• There was still a handful of shake from frame to frame, since the camera's image stabilization was working pretty hard to correct for the table wandering around.  I loaded the timelapse.mp4 into Resolve, and had Resolve do a perspective stabilization on it, which got it pretty solidly decent.
• Finally, I keyframed in Resolve set zoom and crop windows.  Since I had the time lapse set to 10fps, and I had a timeline frame rate of 30fps, I had Resolve interpolate linearly between frames.  Resolve also had optical flow that it could use for this, and it made even smoother looking video, but I felt like it was cheating for this particular case.

I think this came out super duper rad, but I also sort of feel like this is just scratching the surface of what's possible.  I imagine that people who actually know things about video editing are going to have an absolute field day showing off their parts with these time lapses, and when I finally get a chance to breathe, I kind of want to try to put together a turntable to spin a camera around a part as it prints.

Anyway, here's the part where I'm supposed to, like, do marketing, and stuff.  Have you remembered to place your order yet?  How about for the shutter release module?  Do it now!