Pour yourself a nice hot cup of tea, because [iliasam]’s latest work on a laser rangefinder (in Russian, translated here) is a long and interesting read. The shorter version is that he got his hands on a broken laser security scanner, nearly completely reverse-engineered it, got it working again, put it on a Roomba that was able to map out his apartment, and then re-designed it to become a tripod-mounted, full-room 3D scanner. Wow.
The scanner in question has a spinning mirror and a laser time-of-flight ranger, and is designed to shut down machinery when people enter a “no-go” region. As built, it returns ranges along a horizontal plane — it’s a 2D scanner. The conversion to a 3D scanner meant adding another axis, and to do this with sufficient precision required flipping the rig on its side, salvaging the fantastic bearings from a VHS machine, and driving it all with the surprisingly common A4988 stepper driver and an Arduino. A program on a PC reads in the data, and the stepper moves another 0.36 degrees. The results speak for themselves.
This isn’t [iliasam]’s first laser-rangefinder project, naturally. We’ve previously featured his homemade parallax-based ranger for use on a mobile robot, which is equally impressive. What amazes us most about these builds is the near-professional quality of the results pulled off on a shoestring budget.
Well I can make an LED blink TWICE…
I’m a pro at making the magic smoke come out
Which colour is your success of smoke ?
I have a Ph.D. in B.S.
Ghost in the Shell…
Amazing! This is why I come here!
Welp, there goes my budget.
Yes, mine as well ! Cant stop it… i just ordered the stuff for it…. It’s gonna be awesome!
Fantastic. But I have to admit, that the bit that pulled my eye in was the GPL 3D point cloud processing software that they used ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloudCompare ). I’m going to have to take a look at that.
Spectacular.
Only 6 comments? (Or well 7). HaD is offically rendered speechless.
what does he do with all this good data?
Nice Job.
I like it alot.
Um, this isn’t a teardown of a 3D scanner.
It’s a teardown of a 2D safety scanner, which was built into a very basic 3D scanner by mounting it on a scanning servo.
That said – it’s interesting to see the internals of a safety-rated scanner such as the lens dirt monitoring system.
Indeed buying is no fun at all. So how much do you ask if you make me one?
Great quality point cloud btw.
This really has me amazed! thanks for posting and showing what can be done.