Hacked Turntable Rotates Humans For 3D Scanning

If you are from the 70’s, you’ll probably remember the Disco Body Shaper or the Aerobic Body Shaper exerciser devices that were the rage of the day. Basically, Lazy Susan turntables on which humans could stand and twist away to burn fat. The results were suspect, but [Daniel Kucera] thought one of them would be ideal in 2016 to build a heavy-duty turntable to allow full body scanning.

He had already tried a few other ideas and failed, so it was worth giving this a shot, since it cost just 10 bucks to buy one. The plan was to use a motor to provide friction drive along the circumference of the turntable platform. For this, he used a high torque motor with a gear on the output shaft. From the looks of it, he attached a Meccano plate to the base, and mounted the motor to this plate. A large spring keeps the motor pressed against the rim of the turntable. A strip of rubber scavenged from a bicycle tube was glued along the side of the turntable to provide some friction to the gear drive. The turntable is placed on two thick pieces of foam, to provide clearance for the motor. We aren’t sure if a toothed gear is the best choice to drive this thing, but a hacker’s gotta use what he’s got. He’s clocking 190 seconds for a full rotation, but he still hasn’t posted any scan results from the Android scanner software that he is working on. This one, for sure, doesn’t qualify for a “it’s not a hack” comment.

12 thoughts on “Hacked Turntable Rotates Humans For 3D Scanning

    1. To be honest, if you do ANY form of exercise regularly, it will (likely) help with the areas it’s supposed to target. This is why even bad martial arts schools will leave people fairly physically fit.

      1. If by ‘target’ you mean putting one’s back out, then indeed these are the best tool for that. These things suck as an apparatus for exercise unless you are already relatively fit, and then you wouldn’t be caught dead on one.

  1. Clever idea, and I could see this being used for an inanimate object, but putting a human on one for three + minutes will lead to the same problems as the old long-exposure plate cameras. People just don’t hold still very well.

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