Pi Camera Mount
A Raspberry Pi camera board is smaller than a postage stamp, weighs nothing, and the only cable it needs is the ribbon. That makes it the easiest camera to put somewhere awkward — pointed at a printer bed, down a greenhouse row, at a bird feeder — as long as you have something to hold it there. This is that something: a clamp that snaps onto a 15 mm pipe, with the Pi itself sitting somewhere dry on the end of a long ribbon.
The CAD folder holds two parts. bruh_pi_2_camera_mount is the bracket the
camera bolts to, and it has never been exported — it lives in the Fusion file as
a mesh body, which is also why the STEP beside it is empty. cam_pipe_clamp is
the part that puts it on the pipe, and that one is exported, so it is the part
this page can measure and tell you how to print.
Parts
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- Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2 — the 8 MP CSI board, and the camera this project is named for.
- Adafruit 18 in / 457 mm camera flex cable — the ribbon in the camera’s box is about six inches, which puts the Pi right next to the lens. This is the part that lets the camera go on a pipe and the Pi go somewhere sensible. Ben bought it two days after the camera module, in the same order as the screws below.
- Raspberry Pi 4 kit — board, supply and cables in one box, which is the shortest route to a working camera. If you already have a supply, the Pi 3 B+ board on its own plus a 5 V 2.5 A micro-USB supply is cheaper and does the same job here. The original mount is named for a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B — the four board mounting holes have not moved since, so anything from the 2 B up to the 4 B bolts to the same pattern.
- SanDisk 256 GB Extreme microSDXC — an A2 card. Buy the rated one; a camera Pi writes constantly and a cheap card is how you find out what card wear looks like.
- M2 / M3 / M4 stainless cap screws and nuts, 1080 pcs — the camera board’s four corner holes take M2, which the M3-only print kits don’t cover. If you are bolting the Pi down as well you also want M2.5 standoffs.
- PETG for the clamp if it is going outdoors, PLA+ if it isn’t. This matters more than usual — see Print settings.
- ONE-WRAP hook-and-loop tie, cut to length — for strapping the ribbon to the pipe. Use this rather than a zip tie. A zip tie pulled one click too far creases a flex cable and that crease is permanent.
- Optional: an IP65 box with two cable glands if the Pi end is living outside.
- Optional: a metal super clamp with a 1/4”-20 stud — if your pipe is nowhere near 15 mm and you would rather not rescale the print, this is the bought answer.
Check which Pi you are buying before you order the camera. The Pi 5 dropped the wide 15-pin CSI connector that every board up to the Pi 4 used, so this camera and this ribbon plug into a Pi 4 or older and need an adapter cable on a Pi 5. The Pi 4 kit linked above is the safe pairing.
The clamp
Measured off cam_pipe_clamp_v2.stl, because the model is the only thing that
knows.
The sleeve is a 15.0 mm bore with an 18.0 mm outside diameter — a 1.5 mm wall — and it is 57 mm long. It wraps 305° of the pipe and leaves a 55° mouth, which is a 7 mm opening onto a 15 mm tube. That is a snap fit, not a slip fit: the sleeve has to spring about 8 mm wider to get over the pipe and then hold.
Around the outside sits a second, curved cover, hinged to the sleeve by three curved links at 20 mm centres. Each link has a 1.9 mm hole at both ends and rides on a 1.6 mm rod that runs the full length of the sleeve and the cover. Opposite the hinge, a hook stands off the sleeve’s other edge for the cover’s free end to latch onto.
If your pipe isn’t 15 mm, scale the whole part uniformly by your pipe’s outside diameter divided by 15. That is the only change that keeps the mouth, the wall and the hinge in proportion with each other — stretching one axis in the slicer turns the bore into an oval and the clamp stops gripping.
Print settings
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Layer height | 0.16 mm |
| Perimeters | 4, at a 0.4 mm nozzle |
| Infill | 0% — nothing in this part is thicker than its own walls |
| Supports | None |
| Material | PETG outdoors, PLA+ indoors |
| Orientation | Standing on end, bore axis vertical |
Stand it on end. Every layer of the sleeve is then the same cross-section, the 1.5 mm wall comes out as four solid perimeters with no infill involved, and the latch hook prints without a single overhang. Laid on its side it needs support inside a 15 mm bore, which you then have to pick out of a part with a 1.5 mm wall.
Material is a structural choice here, not a colour choice. The sleeve is a spring — it gets flexed 8 mm every time it goes on or comes off a pipe. PLA is brittle in that job and will crack at the mouth after a handful of cycles; PETG takes the flex and takes the sun. Print it in PETG unless the clamp is going somewhere indoors and staying there.
The STL is the assembly, not a print plate. All five bodies are in the one file, sitting where they sit when the clamp is built — the three links are interlocked with the sleeve and the cover rather than laid out beside them, and the hinge gap is 0.13 mm on the radius. No FDM printer running a 0.4 mm line gives you a free-moving hinge out of that, and the links can’t be assembled afterwards either, because their holes are closed circles on rods that are part of the sleeve.
What does work is printing the sleeve on its own. On its own it is a complete snap-on clamp for a 15 mm pipe, and it is what the rest of this page assumes you have printed. The hinged cover is the part of this project that is still CAD.
Assembly
-
Print the sleeve standing on end, then run a knife or a deburring blade around both ends of the mouth. The first layer’s elephant’s foot is exactly where the clamp has to flex, and leaving it there is where the first crack starts.
-
Snap it onto the pipe before anything else is attached. Push it on square, not at an angle — twisting a C-clip on tends to split it at one end. If it fights you in PETG, thirty seconds with a hot air gun on low makes it compliant and it stiffens again as it cools.
-
Bolt the camera board to the bracket with four M2 screws through its corner holes. Do them up finger-tight and no more; the camera PCB is thin and the mounting holes are close to the edge.
-
Route the ribbon along the pipe with hook-and-loop, not zip ties, and leave a loose loop at the camera end. The loop is what absorbs the pull when somebody knocks the cable, instead of the connector doing it.
-
Seat the ribbon at both ends last. Lift the black retainer on each connector, slide the ribbon fully home, press the retainer down. Contacts face the HDMI port on the Pi. Backwards, the camera simply isn’t detected — there is no partial failure mode to diagnose.
The ribbon is the part that fails
Everything else here you can drop on the floor. The ribbon you cannot, and it is worth knowing the three ways it goes wrong before it goes wrong.
The camera isn’t detected at all. The ribbon is in backwards, or it is not pushed fully home under the retainer. Both ends. Check the Pi end first — it is the one people get right by accident and then never look at again.
It works on the bench and not on the pipe. Eighteen inches is a long run for a CSI ribbon, and it is unshielded. Keep it away from mains cable and away from anything switching — a relay board, a PWM LED driver, a motor. Running it alongside a live 12 V lighting feed for a foot is enough to put noise in the image.
Intermittent dropouts after a few weeks outdoors. The ribbon has been flexing in the wind at a fixed point, usually right where a tie holds it. Move the tie, add the slack loop from step 4, and replace the cable — a creased flex doesn’t recover.
Files & downloads
Printable parts
CAD source
The design itself, if you want to change it rather than print it. A STEP file is exact geometry and opens in almost anything; a Fusion 360 archive keeps the modelling history, so you can go back and edit the sketch that made the part.
- bruh_pi_2_camera_mount_v2.f3d Fusion 360 archive — the editable design, with its history
- bruh_pi_2_camera_mount_v2.step STEP — opens in Fusion 360, FreeCAD, Onshape, SolidWorks
- cam_pipe_clamp_v2.f3d Fusion 360 archive — the editable design, with its history
- cam_pipe_clamp_v2.step STEP — opens in Fusion 360, FreeCAD, Onshape, SolidWorks