[Till Handel] just put the finishing touches on a paper he wrote about how to build a cheap 3D scanner — mostly out of spare parts.
Using parts from old printers and notebooks, he’s cobbled together this rather rough-looking laser scanner. But don’t be fooled by its looks! It’s capable of scanning 360° around itself at distances from 0.3 – 5m, making it an excellent candidate for scanning rooms.
It uses a line laser and a webcam mounted on an arm driven by a stepper motor, which looks like it’s out of an old optical drive. An Arduino Uno and an A4988POW stepper driver control the system. The paper (Caution: PDF) is very detailed and published under GPLv3 (a general public license).
It works the same as many 3D scanners — a line laser provides a 2D profile/outline of the object being scanned that the camera picks up. As the system (or object) rotates, new profiles are recorded and sewn together to form a complete 3D image.
To increase the resolution and accuracy of the scanner, you can always put a better camera on the end!
60 EUR buys me food for the whole month (I live in Poland). I think i’ll pass on that 3D scanner.
Webcam and line laser are mixed up on the diagram lol
Huh? It’s rotated 180 degrees from the photo but looks right to me. Why do you think they’re mixed up?
How the hell is this ‘cheap’ when it costs 60 euro? There’s no more than 20 euro (or less if you can scavenge) of parts here!
Hello everyone,
I uploaded a newer version of the paper:
http://alicedownthecoffeepot.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/documentation_laser_scanner1.pdf
(The makefile-code described in the old version contained unnecessary compiler intructions related to the ROOT-libs that were not used in the final version of the program.)
figure 11 – constant current driver for LED – has no Vref as mentioned in calcuation below it.
Vref is the internal reference voltage of the LM317 and has a value of 1.25V (as shown in the 3rd term of the equation). If you want read more about it check out the datasheet:
http://www.st.com/web/en/resource/technical/document/datasheet/CD00000455.pdf