Recycled Zero Cost 3D Scanner
This is another one of the projects I have done for Design and Technology at school. This time it is for a Year 11 minor project where we had to design the majority of the project out of reused materials that would otherwise be thrown away. I was originally going to do some more experimentation with casting aluminium but then I decided on building this 3d scanner.
The project consisted of:
- Building a turntable to be controlled by the computer that can rotate the object accurately
- Convert a laser pointer to emit a line onto the object rather than a dot
- Have some way to take pictures of the position of the laser line on the object
- Write programs to control the turntable, find and process the laser line in the captured images and display the processed information as a 3d model
Here is a picture of the general setup I ended up using (I didn't get a good photo of the new stepper and gearing I got to rotate the object)
In this image you can see the turntable (black circle), the laser pointer being refracted into a line using the glass rod in the top right, the circuit board used to control the motor, and the board used as a quick way to trigger the camera.
Here are some images from the different stages of the process:
The object to be scanned
The object sits on the turntable and is rotated accurately using a stepper motor. The first stepper I used allowed 98 steps per revolution (the scan you can see below) while the second stepper motor I used had extra gearing and allowed 290 steps per revolution.
The hardest stage in the entire project is the extraction of an exact line from the image. The stages of this are:
- Load the raw image
- Extract the Red channel out of the RGB image
- Find the entire line in this image as a 2 bit image
- Decide upon an exact line through the previous blob ignoring noise
Coordinates are calculated for each point using how high in the image each point on the line is, what rotation the table was at in the image and some basic trigonometry to create thousands of data points that are then linked and covered with faces by a blender script to create a model.
The Raw Model
Then I have simply manually tidied up the model removing where the table appears in the scan and smoothing it.
Trimmed and smoothed
Then I have applied a stock wood texture to the model to produce the final result. I think that it has turned out rather well for a first go at creating a 3D scanner especially as it only took a few weeks and cost me nothing.
The finished product
I am happy to answer any questions you might have and last of all if you are still curious here are some of the sheets I handed in with my folio to show how the points were converted after extraction.
[download id="11"]
Simple wooden puzzles
I came across plans for these puzzles and made them for a friends birthday they ended up turning out quite well except for the joining of the metal rings. For the top puzzle you need to get the two beads next to each other on the same loop, for the lower one you simply need to remove the ring. Of the two the top one is the hardest.
High Res Photography
During the recent family trip to Mount Arapilies, Victoria, I took plenty of photos and I'll probably be putting more up on here later.
One of the more interesting things that I had a go at was creating a really, really high res image. The one below consists of over 200 photos and when joined results in a photo around 400 Megapixels.
The main problem after you have waited for your photos to be stitched is how to edit them. Standard image viewers refuse to open them, photoshop crashes. Eventually I found a viewer that splits the images up into thousands of tiles that makes it easy and fast to view. I am still looking for a way to edit the finished image though.
I was very annoyed when I got home to find that when taking the pictures I had missed a narrow strip across the image. I plan on having a another go of taking more photos like this closer to home and I have ideas for a simple robot to automate the taking of them.
You can explore it HERE
How many climbers can you find?
Golden Light
I took these photos while waiting for dad to finish a nearby geocache (Go here if you don't know what geocacheing is), i had my camera on me from a party earlier in the day and thought the view along the road looked quite nice in the semi dark. Its a shame that there is so much noise around the lights but i only had my little compact camera.
(Click for a larger image)
Jervis Bay
I took this picture when out on an early morning bike ride, it is 2 photos with different exposures overlayed on each other
Click for larger image
And this panorama after we built a giant sand pyramid, we calculated it and it turned out to be 10 tons 7 tons (correction) of sand (4.05 cubic meters)
Not very happy with this one picure