Soooooo… it’s been a while, right? There’s been a lot happening in the last decade, but I’m not here to talk about that (at least not yet).

I’m here to talk about 3D printing, something I’ve been tinkering with for a while. Specifically, 3D printing a teleprompter (for reasons yet to be revealed). There’s certainly plenty of other, similar projects out there if you hit up the Google, but whatever. Really, none of them fit my needs, namely:

  • Use the official (i.e. standardized) Raspberry Pi touchscreen for the display piece. While I don’t need touch input, it’s inexpensive enough and made to a consistent spec.
  • Ideally be one-piece, rather than clipped together, since I have the build volume.
  • Connect directly to the tripod/camera, rather than requiring a separate stand.

Starting with that last requirement first, it turns out there’s industry standards for mounting accessories to cameras (just Google “camera rod mount”). In our case, we’re targeting LWS for no other reason than the camera on our wishlist has LWS-spec mounts. In the interim, we can always cobble something together, and since we’re already talking about 3D printing here, let’s go for broke.

Spoiler alert: my current “dream” camera is a Blackmagic Design Studio Camera 4K Pro G2, but really the whole line is fair game, so LWS just makes sense. Since a decent camera needs a decent tripod and knowning that Manfrotto has a solid reputation in the video space, I did some searching and wound up buying a “used” MVT502AM tripod with MVH502A head for a very nice price. That latter part comes into play, since the 502A uses an interchangeable baseplate (504PLONG), and we can reproduce that on the 3D printer (Thingiverse model). 3D printable version of the 504PLONG baseplate

Since I don’t yet have my dream camera, I’m going to use this contraption with what I do have: a couple of GoPro Hero cameras of various generations (7 and 11, to be exact). While the GoPro is easy to attach to a tripod with the included accessories (and looks comically tiny on something “real” like the Manfrotto), it sits far too low for our purpose, and the lens isn’t centered horizontally. With a bit of frustration, I imported the baseplate model into Autodesk Fusion and was able to come up with a design for a baseplate that would mate to the Manfrotto tripod and integrated the LWS mount as well as an appropriately-positioned GoPro mount. Manfrotto 504PLONG baseplate with GoPro and LWS mounts

With that in place, I turned to the teleprompter itself. There’s plenty of pre-made models out there, but none of them really satisfied all of my requirements, so I figured it was time to build from scratch. I’d previously made a project using the Raspberry Pi touchscreen taking advantage of a pre-existing model, so that seemed like a good start. With that as the basis, I built things up to hold a thin sheet of acrylic (Amazon) up top and added an LWS mount below, and I had myself the start of a teleprompter. Teleprompter model First attempt at a teleprompter

And wouldn’t you know, it works a treat! There’s still some issues to be resolved, in particular the lack of shrouding between the back of the teleprompter and the camera lens. I’m still on the fence between figuring out a fabric-based solution to be flexible and just 3D-printing a physical insert to mask off the space around the lens. I’d also like to come up with an insert for the top front to hide the slight gap between the acrylic and the body of the prompter, partly to give extra support but also to stop reflections from creeping in through the edge of the acrylic sheet. There’s also some gotchas with how I attached the LWS mounts, but those are all problems for the future.

And speaking of the future (I promise it won’t take 10 years to materialize!), I’ll talk about the actual hardware/software side of the teleprompter in more depth. There’s a lot of options out there and while I had reasons for choosing the ones that I did, I know they’re not perfect for everyone, so I wanted to focus on just the physical setup for now.

Oh, and remember how I said above that I don’t yet have that dream camera? Turns out that I took so long to write this post that I actually do! And I’ll be damned if the teleprompter didn’t line up perfectly from the get-go. But I’ll talk more about that in the future (again, I swear that post will appear before 2035).