Really-really nice article! I'm currently working on a single-process, in-memory, multiplayer game written in Golang. (: Happy and relieved to hear that it worked out for you and I might even borrow some ideas (e.g. I'm less worried about bandwidth, but Protobuf might still make sense). Thank you very much for sharing!
Yes, this is completely stiff, no flexible parts. I've experimented with a few gears and different distances between them. I've found that this herringbone gear works very well. I don't experience any visible backlash, but the gearing ratio also helps to suppress that.
I've printed everything from Hobbyking Premium PLA. Just as you've described, the rotation gets smoother after some wear. But even after 30-40 hours of use they still don't seem to become loose at all.
Securing everything on the bearing, there's no visible wobbling. I really recommend using a bearing if possible, it makes things so much easier. (:
Yeah, it's weird on mobile. I had to drag a very narrow column from the very left side to the right to make the point cloud visible. Thanks for the feedback, I'll add some images!
Here's a very rough estimate. This is how long it'd take for someone who's familiar with the steps. E.g. if you've never tried soldering, it could take much longer.
- Days/weeks of waiting for components to arrive. (:
- ~20 hours of 3d printing
- 1 hour of soldering
- 4 hours of cable assembly (worst part) (:
- 4 hours of assembly
- 4 hours of installing software
This is for scanning larger things (rooms, buildings). For smaller objects, there's another open-source project that you might find useful: openscan.eu
Thanks for the feedback! A single scan takes around 40 minutes. The multi-scan example took me an afternoon to take. (: I've tried Meshlab but then ended up using CloudCompare for combining the point clouds. That was done completely manually.
Thank you very much for the kind words and the recommendation! Adding a camera is probably the next step I'll take. Adding color information to the point cloud would be a huge plus. I haven't tried photogrammetry before but I assume it works best if things are captured from multiple angles so my current setup of taking measurements from a single point isn't the best fit. But maybe combining scans from different standpoints...
I could justify that with being so standard that it's available everywhere but TBH that's just what my local electronics store had. (: I've also realized that it's probably overkill for the job and added a note in the documentation.
Yes, you're right, this is extremely low resolution, compared to commercial scanners. This is mostly the result of using a point-by-point scanner. One thing I have on my plate is exchanging that for a field-of-view scanner (probably a Livox Mid-40).
One interesting feature of the current setup is the ability to "zoom in" on details. With the microstepping mode of the stepper motors, one can take 2/4/8 times as dense measurements of an area if necessary. The limiting factor here is time. A single scan takes around 40 minutes with the current resolution (1800*300).
I've started with EasyEDA and stuck with it as it worked okay so unfortunately I can't help with a comparison. I've tried the autorouter and it worked (=didn't fail) for earlier prototypes when the board wasn't so packed, but it couldn't do it (was hanging indefinitely) for the current layout so I did it manually. It wasn't that painful... (:
Taking a break from my software developer job, I've started to work on my first ever hardware project and with too much free time on my hands it quickly turned into something bigger than I've anticipated.
Working with a friend, we wanted to explore the use of 3D scanners on construction sites but quickly got stuck as no cheap hardware was available to fool around with. How hard can it be to build one I thought? I've already programmed Arduinos to blink LEDs before, this isn't that different... Then a few months into the project I've realized that I've spent way too much time on this to let it go to waste and started turning this into a community project.
At this point I've reached the first milestone of having a working 3D scanner with (hopefully) enough documentation to help others get started with building their own. I'm sharing this with you now to spread the word, get feedback and to invite you to contribute if you feel like it! (: