Close up Nozzle Cam

I found a cheap (12€) USB cam board with an OV9726 chip on a well known platform that has manual focus and a 50° view, so it seemed like a good way to take a look at what my nozzle was doing.

To mount the board in my Ender 3 S1 I made this bracket.
The original cable was too short (50cm), so I soldered a longer one and also 4 white LEDs (6 possible - too many with the ones I had in stock).

It plugs directly into the sonic pad and worked fine.

Sadly it uses some supports (and sorry, you need to rotate by 90°) 

There is a version that uses all 4 mounting points, but for me the 3 point version works better. The screws are M3 and because the threads are longer than needed you can use 3 and move the board in between so you can adjust the direction the camera centre is looking.

As an impression of the not so great video quality, here are two short shots from a first layer check (my most wanted feature for this) and another later on (higher speed - not such great)

(maybe one of the other available boards with better cameras provides better quality - like OV9732 based or others - dont know, tell me if you find out :-) )

For me this is good enough to see if something is wrong - at higher print speeds there is a lot of motion blurring, but the flow from the nozzle remains clearly recognisable.

one mor short video on a later layer with higher speed.