Tiny Moves, Big Depth: An Open-Source Macro Focus Slider

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://hackaday.com/2026/04/05/tiny-moves-big-depth-an-open-source-macro-focus-slider/

Here is how extrusions are made:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76NcaTxFdE8

As you can see it's not a super accurate process. This is why it's not recommended to screw on linear rails and why some companies offer a machining service to make a flat surface. Another common practice is to let customers discover over-wrapped/twisted extrusions and then help via support.

#machines #3dprinting #extrusion #linearrail #motion

I'm learning about 3D printing! My printer needs to be lubricated. It has linear rails.

I didn't know that linear rails had ball bearings supporting them.

That is awesome.

This video is about how to lubricate linear rails common in 3D printers, but it contains great views of the ball bearings in the linear rail, which I thought was super awesome to see. News to me, and now I totally understand the lubrication process for linear rails a lot more.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=GWzz6fQiWmw

#linearrail #3dprinter #machine

Video De-shaker Software Measures Linear Rail Quality

Here's an interesting experiment that attempts to measure the quality of a linear rail by using a form of visual odometry, accomplished by mounting a camera on the rail and analyzing the video with open-source software usually used to stabilize shaky video footage. No linear rail is perfect, and it should be possible to measure the degree of imperfection by recording video footage while the camera moves down the length of the rail, and analyzing the result. Imperfections in the rail should cause the video to sway a proportional amount, which would allow one to characterize the rail's quality.

To test this idea, [Saulius] attached a high-definition camera to a linear rail, pointed the camera towards a high-contrast textured pattern (making the resulting video easier to analyze), and recorded video while moving the camera across the rail at a fixed speed. The resulting video gets fed into the Deshaker plugin for VirtualDub, of which the important part is the deshaker.log file, which contains X, Y, rotate, and zoom correction values required to stabilize the video. [Saulius] used these values to create a graph characterizing the linear rail's quality.

It's a clever proof of concept, especially in how it uses no special tools and leverages a video stabilizing algorithm in an unusual way. However, the results aren't exactly easy to turn into concrete, real-world measurements. Turning image results into micrometers is a matter of counting pixels, and for this task video stabilizing is an imperfect tool, since the algorithm prioritizes visual results instead of absolute measurements. Still, it's an interesting experiment, and perfectly capable of measuring rail quality in a relative sense. Can't help but be a bit curious about how it would profile something like these cardboard CNC modules.

#cnchacks #videohacks #cnc #linearrail #odometry #stabilization #video #virtualdub