3D Printing a 72-58mm step down Camera Filter Adapter
I have a 58mm ND5 filter that I bought to photograph the 2017 solar eclipse. It worked pretty well for that with my Sony RX100 V, but now I want to use it with an RX10 IV (which has the advantage of a 600mm equivalent zoom). The RX10 accepts 72mm filters and I want to try and photograph an ISS transit which is happening sooner than I can get hold of an adapter.
I figured someone must have done this before, but I can't find a file anywhere. It's a reasonably straightforward part - as the filter is smaller than the thread on the camera I just need a small cylinder which has a 72mm thread on the outside and 58mm on the inside. A step up adapter would be slightly more complicated to accommodate the larger filter size.
To build this I used OpenSCAD and this thread module. Open the thread module file in OpenSCAD and then you just need to subtract the inner thread from the outer thread like this:
This makes a simple 10mm tall adapter and you would just need to change the thread sizes to make it work for pretty much any combination of camera and filter (most filter sizes use a 0.75mm pitch as shown above). The vignetting is pretty extreme with the smaller filter and the size of the adapter. For this application I don't care, I'm only using the center of the image. If it's a problem for your application then it might be worth reducing the height of the adapter, at the expense of making it harder to detach from the camera.
Here is the adapter STL file on thingiverse.
After all that, I missed the transit by a couple of seconds. I thought the clock on my phone would be accurate enough but turns out it's 5 seconds off. So memo to self for next time - shoot over a longer window, or just take a video.
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(Published to the Fediverse as: 3D Printing a 72-58mm step down Camera Filter Adapter #etc #3dprint #solar #filter #thingiverse #iss How to 3D print a step down camera filter adapter with OpenSCAD code and the STL file for a specific 72mm to 58mm project (adapting a solar filter for a Sony RX10 IV camera). )
Comments
I found a workaround that solves the problem in OpenSCAD version 2021.01: create two concentric cylinders with threads on one face each and take their union:
union() {
difference () {
cylinder (r=56, h=10, $fn=100);
metric_thread (diameter=112, pitch=1, length=10, internal=true, n_starts=6);
}
difference () {
metric_thread (diameter=118, pitch=1, length=10, internal=false, n_starts=6);
cylinder (r=56, h=10, $fn=100);
};
}
I just tested this again and I see the same problem with the latest OpenSCAD. One possible work around is to reduce the height. I found that this would render at 3mm but not any higher. The other possibility would be to experiment with the limit in Preferences for OpenSCAD (Advanced, Turn off rendering at...). If this doesn't help then I'd suggest contacting the author of the threads module. The code above isn't doing anything crazy.
I am getting the same error messages. I simply plopped this into the top four lines of the file so that it looks like
"difference() {
metric_thread(118, 1.0 ,10);
metric_thread(112, 1.0 ,10, internal=true);
}
/*
* ISO-standard metric threads, following this specification:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_metric_screw_thread
*
* Copyright 2022 Dan Kirshner - [email protected]
* This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
* it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as ..."
and clicked the preview (and render) buttons. Is there something more to do to get this to work?
Weird but i cant get this to work in OpenSCAD and the openscad-threads module?
"WARNING Normalized tree is growing past 200000 elements. Aborting normalization.
WARNING CSG normalization resulted in an empty tree"
Thank you very much for this. I'm currently creating an adapter to scan Dia Films with my camera and this is a very handy tool.
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