Improved 3D Scanning Rig Adds Full-Sized Camera Support

May 17, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 3 Comments

There are plenty of reasons to pick up or build a 3D scanner. Modeling for animation or special effects, reverse engineering or designing various devices or products, and working with fabrics and clothing are all well within the wide range of uses for these tools. [Vojislav] built one a few years ago which used an array of cameras to capture 3D information but the Pi camera modules used in this build limited the capabilities of the scanner in some ways. [Vojislav]’s latest 3D scanner takes a completely different approach by using a single high-quality camera instead.

The new 3D scanner is built to carry a full-size DSLR camera, its lens, and a light. Much more similarly to how a 3D printer works, the platform moves the camera around the object in programmable steps for the desired 3D scan. The object being scanned sits on a rotating plate as well, allowing for the entire object to be scanned without needing to move the camera through a full 180° in two axes. The scanner can also be used for scanning more 2D objects while capturing information about texture, such as various textiles.

For anyone looking to reproduce something like this, [Vojislav] has made all of the plans for this build available on the project’s GitHub page including some sample gcode to demonstrate the intended use for the scanner. On the other hand, if you’re short the often large amount of funding required to get a DSLR camera, his older 3D scanner is still worth taking a look at as well.

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The film scanner [xssfox] found, in the center of a table, with other stuff strewn across the table

Answering All Your ISCSI Scanner Questions

May 12, 2024 by Arya Voronova 17 Comments

iSCSI is a widely used protocol for exposing SCSI devices over a network connection, and some scanners have in the past been equipped with SCSI ports. So, could you have an iSCSI network scanner? [xssfox] details her journey making a Canoscan FS4000US film scanner work over iSCSI, sparked by someone’s overly-confident StackOverflow comment that it couldn’t be done. Nothing in the spec said it couldn’t actually work, however, and after figuring out a tentative architecture, a hardware setup was put together.

No flatbed scanners with SCSI ports could be found on the cheap, so a film scanner had to be procured. After figuring out a few hitches with the loading mechanism and getting a test image locally, it was time to try and build up the software setup, tearing through SCSI compatibility and cabling, driver and PCI pass-through woes, bluescreens, and intermediate software having dropped some of the necessary features by now. Still, [xssfox] eventually exported the scanner as an iSCSI target – and, on the other end of the network, successfully connected to it and completed a scan. The StackOverflow answer was wrong, after all.

It’s fun to see how far old technology can go, and get answers to questions you never knew you had. Whether you’re reminiscing about SCSI days or wondering what the technology about, we’ve talked about it aplenty, from a retrospective to modern-day experiments, repurposing old SCSI hardware for modern SATA ports, a Raspberry Pi implementation, an emulator, and a fair bit more.

We thank [Valentijn Sessink] and [adistuder] for sharing this with us!

Pi 5 And SDR Team Up For A Digital Scanner You Can Actually Afford

February 10, 2024 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

Listening to police and fire calls used to be a pretty simple proposition: buy a scanner, punch in some frequencies — or if you’re old enough, buy the right crystals — and you’re off to the races. It was a pretty cheap and easy hobby, all things considered. But progress marches on, and with it came things like trunking radio and digital modulation, requiring ever more sophisticated scanners, often commanding eye-watering prices.

Having had enough of that, [Top DNG] decided to roll his own digital trunking scanner on the cheap. The first video below is a brief intro to the receiver based on the combination of an RTL-SDR dongle and a Raspberry Pi 5. The Pi is set up in headless mode and runs sdrtrunk, which monitors the control channels and frequency channels of trunking radio systems, as well as decoding the P25 digital modulation — as long as it’s not encrypted; don’t even get us started on that pet peeve. The receiver also sports a small HDMI touchscreen display, and everything can be powered over USB, so it should be pretty portable. The best part? Everything can be had for about $250, considerably cheaper than the $600 or so needed to get into a purpose-built digital trunking scanner — we’re looking at our Bearcat BCD996P2 right now and shedding a few tears.

The second video below has complete details and a walkthrough of a build, from start to finish. [Top DNG] notes that sdrtrunk runs the Pi pretty hard, so a heat sink and fan are a must. We’d probably go with an enclosure too, just to keep the SBC safe. A better antenna is a good idea, too, although it seems like [Top DNG] is in the thick of things in Los Angeles, where LAPD radio towers abound. The setup could probably support multiple SDR dongles, opening up a host of possibilities. It might even be nice to team this up with a Boondock Echo. We’ve had deep dives into trunking before if you want more details.

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ThunderScan: The Wild 1980s Product That Turned A Printer Into A Scanner

December 12, 2023 by Lewin Day 27 Comments

Back in the 1980s, printers were expensive things. Scanners were rare, particularly for the home market, because home computers could barely handle basic graphics anyway. Back in these halcyon days, an obscure company called Thunderware built a device to convert the former into the latter. It was known as the Thunderscan, and was a scanning head built for the Apple ImageWriter dot matrix printer. Weird enough already, but this device hides some weird secrets in its design.

The actual scanning method was simple enough; the device mounted a carriage to the printer head of the ImageWriter. In that carriage was an optical reflective sensor which was scanned across a page horizontally while it was fed through the printer. So far, so normal.

The hilarious part is how the scanner actually delivered data to the Macintosh computer it was hooked up to. It did precisely nothing with the serial data lines at all, these were left for the computer to command the printer. Instead, the output of the analog optical sensor was fed to a voltage-to-frequency converter, which was then hooked up to the handshake/clock-in pin on the serial port.

The scanner software simply looked at the rate at which new characters were becoming available on the serial port as the handshake pin was toggled at various frequencies by the output of the optical sensor. Faster toggling of the pin indicated a darker section of the image, slower corresponded to lighter.

Interestingly, [Andy Hertzfeld] also has his own stories to tell on the development, for which his software contribution seems to have netted him a great sum of royalties over the years. It’s funny to think how mainstream scanners once were; and yet we barely think about them today beyond a few niche uses. Times, they change.

Thanks to [J. Peterson] for the tip!

LiPo Replacement Keeps Portable Scanner In The Action

November 21, 2023 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

If there’s anything people hate more than being locked into a printer manufacturer’s replacement cartridges, it’s proprietary batteries. Cordless power tools are the obvious example in this space, but there are other devices that insist on crappy battery packs that are expensive to replace when they eventually die.

One such device is the Uniden Bearcat BC296D portable scanner that [Robert Guildig] found for a song at a thrift store, which he recently gave a custom LiPo battery upgrade. It came equipped with a nickel-cadmium battery pack, which even under the best of circumstances has a very limited battery life. Using regular AA batteries wasn’t an option, but luckily the space vacated by the OEM battery pack left a lot of room for mods. Those include a small module with BMS functions and a DC-DC converter, a 2,400 mAh 4.2 V LiPo pillow pack, and a new barrel connector for charging. With the BMS set for six volts and connected right to the old battery pack socket, the scanner can now run for seven hours on a one-hour charge. As a bonus, the LiPo pack should last a few times longer than the NiCd packs, and be pretty cheap to replace when it finally goes too. There’s a video after the hop with all the details.

If you’re looking at a similar battery replacement project, you might want to check out [Arya]’s guide to everything you need to know about lithium-ion circuitry.

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Hands On With Boondock Echo

November 10, 2023 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

Perhaps no words fill me with more dread than, “I hear there’s something going around.” In my experience, you hear this when some nasty bug has worked its way into the community and people start getting whatever it is. I’m always on my guard when I hear about something like this, especially when it’s something really unpleasant like norovirus. Forewarned is forearmed, after all.

Since I work from home and rarely get out, one of the principal ways I keep apprised of what’s going on with public health in my community is by listening to my scanner radio. I have the local fire rescue frequencies programmed in, and if “there’s something going around,” I usually find out about it there first; after a half-dozen or so calls for people complaining of nausea and vomiting, you get the idea it’s best to hunker down for a while.

I manage to stay reasonably well-informed in this way, but it’s not like I can listen to my scanner every minute of the day. That’s why I was really excited when my friend Mark Hughes started a project he called Boondock Echo, which aims to change the two-way radio communications user experience by enabling internet-backed recording and playback. It sounded like the perfect system for me — something that would let my scanner work for me, instead of the other way around. And so when Mark asked me to participate in the beta test, I jumped at the chance.

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Using Industrial CT To Examine A $129 USB Cable

October 24, 2023 by Dan Maloney 77 Comments

What in the world could possibly justify charging $129 for a USB cable? And is such a cable any better than a $10 Amazon Basics cable?

To answer that question, [Jon Bruner] fired up an industrial CT scanner to look inside various cables (Nitter), with interesting results. It perhaps comes as little surprise that the premium cable is an Apple Thunderbolt 4 Pro USB-C cable, which sports 40 Gb/s transfer rates and can deliver 100 Watts of power to a device. And it turns out there’s a lot going on with this cable from an engineering and industrial design perspective. The connector shell has a very compact and extremely complex PCB assembly inside it, with a ton of SMD components and at least one BGA chip. The PCB itself is a marvel, with nine layers, a maze of blind and buried vias, and wiggle traces to balance propagation delays. The cable itself contains 20 wires, ten of which are shielded coax, and everything is firmly anchored to a stainless steel shell inside the plastic connector body.

By way of comparison, [Jon] also looked under the hood at more affordable alternatives. None were close to the same level of engineering as the Apple cable, ranging as they did from a tenth to a mere 1/32nd of the price. While none of the cables contained such a complex PCB, the Amazon Basics cable seemed the best of the bunch, with twelve wires, decent shielding, and a sturdy crimped strain relief. The other cables — well, when you’re buying a $3 cable, you get what you pay for. But does that make the Apple cable worth the expense? That’s for the buyer to decide, but at least now we know there’s something in there aside from Apple’s marketing hype.

We’ve seen these industrial CT scanners used by none other than [Ken Shirriff] and [Curious Marc] to reverse engineer Apollo-era artifacts. If you want a closer look at the instrument itself, check out the video below

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