3D Imaging For Natural Science — For Free

It isn’t that unusual for a home lab to have a microscope, but wouldn’t it be cool to have a CT scanner? Well, you probably won’t anytime soon, but if you are interested in scans of vertebrates — you know, animals with backbones — a group of museums have you covered.

The oVert project is scanning 20,000 specimens and making the results available to everyone. This should be a boon to educators and might even be useful for 3D printing animal forms. Check out the video about the project below.

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Hackaday Links: May 28, 2023

The Great Automotive AM Radio War of 2023 rages on, with the news this week that Ford has capitulated, at least for now. You’ll recall that the opening salvo came when the US automaker declared that AM radio was unusable in their EV offerings thanks to interference generated by the motor controller. Rather than fixing the root problem, Ford decided to delete the AM option from their EV infotainment systems, while letting their rolling EMI generators just keep blasting out interference for everyone to enjoy. Lawmakers began rattling their sabers in response, threatening legislation to include AM radio in every vehicle as a matter of public safety. Ford saw the writing on the wall and reversed course, saying that AM is back for at least the 2024 model year, and that vehicles already delivered without it will get a fix via software update.

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Hackaday Links: November 15, 2020

Now that we drive around cars that are more like mobile data centers than simple transportation, there’s a wealth of data to be harvested when the inevitable crashes occur. After a recent Tesla crash on a California highway, a security researcher got a hold of the car’s “black box” and extracted some terrifying insights into just how bad a car crash can be. The interesting bit is the view of the crash from the Tesla’s forward-facing cameras with object detection overlays. Putting aside the fact that the driver of this car was accelerating up to the moment it rear-ended the hapless Honda with a closing speed of 63 MPH (101 km/h), the update speeds on the bounding boxes and lane sensing are incredible. The author of the article uses this as an object lesson in why Level 2 self-driving is a bad idea, and while I agree with that premise, the fact that self-driving had been disabled 40 seconds before the driver plowed into the Honda seems to make that argument moot. Tech or not, someone this unskilled or impaired was going to have an accident eventually, and it was just bad luck for the other driver.

Last week I shared a link to Scan the World, an effort to 3D-scan and preserve culturally significant artifacts and create a virtual museum. Shortly after the article ran we got an email from Elisa at Scan the World announcing their “Unlocking Lockdown” competition, which encourages people to scan cultural artifacts and treasures directly from their home. You may not have a Ming Dynasty vase or a Grecian urn on display in your parlor, but you’ve probably got family heirlooms, knick-knacks, and other tchotchkes that should be preserved. Take a look around and scan something for posterity. And I want to thank Elisa for the link to the Pompeiian bread that I mentioned.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)has been running an interesting challenge for the last couple of years: The Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. The goal is to discover new ways to operate autonomously below the surface of the Earth, whether for mining, search and rescue, or warfare applications. They’ve been running different circuits to simulate various underground environments, with the most recent circuit being a cave course back in October. On Tuesday November 17, DARPA will webcast the competition, which features 16 teams and their autonomous search for artifacts in a virtual cave. It could make for interesting viewing.

If underground adventures don’t do it for you, how about going upstairs? LeoLabs, a California-based company that specializes in providing information about satellites, has a fascinating visualization of the planet’s satellite constellation. It’s sort of Google Earth but with the details focused on low-earth orbit. You can fly around the planet and watch the satellites whiz by or even pick out the hundreds of spent upper-stage rockets still up there. You can lock onto a specific satellite, watch for near-misses, or even turn on a layer for space debris, which honestly just turns the display into a purple miasma of orbiting junk. The best bit, though, is the easily discerned samba-lines of newly launched Starlink satellites.

A doorbell used to be a pretty simple device, but like many things, they’ve taken on added complexity. And danger, it appears, as Amazon Ring doorbell users are reporting their new gadgets going up in flame upon installation. The problem stems from installers confusing the screws supplied with the unit. The longer wood screws are intended to mount the device to the wall, while a shorter security screw secures the battery cover. Mix the two up for whatever reason, and the sharp point of the mounting screw can find the LiPo battery within, with predictable results.

And finally, it may be the shittiest of shitty robots: a monstrous robotic wolf intended to scare away wild bears. It seems the Japanese town of Takikawa has been having a problem with bears lately, so they deployed a pair of these improbable looking creatures to protect themselves. It’s hard to say what’s the best feature: the flashing LED eyes, the strobe light tail, the fact that the whole thing floats in the air atop a pole. Whatever it is, it seems to work on bears, which is probably good enough. Take a look in the video below the break.

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3D Print Your 3D Scanner

[QLRO] wanted a 3D scanner, but didn’t like any of the existing designs. Some were too complex. Some were simple but required you to do things by hand. That led to him designing his own that he calls AAScan. You can see the thing operating in the video below.

In general, you can move the camera around the object or you can move the object around while the camera stays fixed. This design chooses the latter. You’ll need a stepper motor with a driver board and an Arduino to make the turntable rotate. You also need a computer running Python and Meshroom. The phone also has to run Python and [QLRO] used QPython on an Android device.

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24 Hours Of Temperature Data At A Glance

In an era where we can see the current temperature with just a glance at our smartphones, the classic “Time and Temp” gadget sitting on the desk doesn’t have quite the same appeal. The modern weather fanatic demands more data, which is where this gorgeous full-day temperature display from [Richard] comes in.

The display, built inside of a picture frame, shows the temperature recorded for every hour of the day. If the LED next to the corresponding hour is lit that means the value displayed is from the current day, otherwise it’s a holdover from the previous day’s recordings. This not only makes sure all 24 LED displays have something to show, but gives you an idea of where the temperature might be trending for the rest of the day. Naturally there’s also a display of the instantaneous temperature (indoor and outdoor), plus [Richard] even threw in the current wind speed for good measure.

In the video after the break, [Richard] briefly walks us through the construction of his “Thermo Logger”, which reveals among other things that the beautiful panel art is nothing more exotic than a printed piece of A4 paper. The video also features a 3D model of the inside of the device which appears to have been created through photogrammetry; perhaps one of the coolest pieces of project documentation we’ve ever seen. We’ll just throw this out there: if you want to ensure that your latest build makes the front page of Hackaday, pop off that back panel and make some decent quality 3D scans.

Given the final result, it should come as no surprise to find that this isn’t the first incredible weather display that [Richard] has built. We previously covered another weather monitoring creation of his that needed two seperate display devices to adequately display all the data it was collecting.

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Flying Human Head Lands Just In Time For Halloween

We love the fall here at Hackaday. The nights are cooler, the leaves are changing, and our tip line starts lighting up with some of the craziest things we’ve ever seen. Something about terrifying children of all ages just really speaks to the hacker mindset. That sounds bad, but we’re sure there’s a positive message in there someplace if you care to look hard enough.

Today’s abomination is a truly horrifying human head quadcopter, which exists for literally no other reason than to freak people out. We love it. Created by [Josh] and a few friends, the “HeadOCopter” is built around a meticulously detailed 3D print of his own head. This thing is so purpose-built that they didn’t even put landing gear on it: there’s no point sitting on the ground when you’re in the business of terrorizing people from above.

Sure, you could do this project with a cheap plastic skull. But there’s no way it would have the same effect. [Josh] created this monstrosity by scanning his own head with the Microsoft Kinect, cleaning the model up in ZBrush, adding in mounts for hardware, and 3D printing the result. After doing some smoothing and filling, the head got passed off to artist [Lisa Svingos] for the final painting. He even thought to include an FPV camera where one of his eyes should be, giving a whole new meaning to the term.

As for the quadcopter hardware itself, it uses a BrainFPV RADIX flight controller (get it?) and 12×5 props on Sunnysky V3508 motors with 30A BLHELI ESCs. Measuring 1 meter (3.2 feet) from motor to motor, it’s an impressive piece of hardware itself; head or no head.

This project reminds us of the flying ghost we saw years back, but we have to admit, this raises the bar pretty high. We’re almost afraid to see what comes next.

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3D Popup Cards From 3D Photos

The world of 3D printing is growing rapidly. Some might say it’s growing layer by layer. But there was one aspect that [Ken] wanted to improve upon, and that was in the area of 3D photos. Specifically, printing a 3D pop-up-style photograph that collapses to save space so you can easily carry it around.

It’s been possible to take 3D scans of objects and render a 3D print for a while now, but [Ken] wanted something a little more portable. His 3D pop-up photographs are similar to pop-up books for children, in that when the page is unfolded a three-dimensional shape distances itself from the background.

The process works by taking a normal 3D photo. With the help of some software, sets of points that are equidistant from the camera are grouped into layers. From there, they can be printed in the old 2-dimensional fashion and then connected to achieve the 3D effect. Using a Kinect or similar device would allow for any number of layers and ways of using this method. So we’re throwing down the gauntlet — we want to see an arms-race of pop-up photographs. Who will be the one to have the most layers, and who will find a photograph subject that makes the most sense in this medium? Remember how cool those vector-cut topographical maps were? There must be a similarly impressive application for this!

[Ken] isn’t a stranger around these parts. He was previously featured for his unique weather display and his semi-real-life Mario Kart, so be sure to check those out as well.