Author Andrei
29/04/2019
We've seen other 3D scanners on this website. One was the based on an infrared sensor that would measure distances. Now, we will se something better maybe. Making 3D fiels from a lot of photos is not a new thing. But if you make the photos manually, you might get errors by not moving the same distances, same angle or moved photos. That's why is better to met the "machines" do this precise job. That's exactly what this 3D printed rig will do. In order to capture things in three dimensions, you’ll need to be able to snap multiple photos and stitch them together with software.

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To take all the photos required for this process, “thomas_openscan” has come up with an automated device that rotates the object, allowing him to capture images using a DSLR or smartphone camera. In the photo above we can see an early prototype of this amchine and in the video we can see other attempts. So, this machine will spin the object to scan in all directions and after each movement, we could take a photo, always from the same spot and angle.

Once we have all the photos we could use a software that will go from 2D photos to a 3D object and also keeping good resolution. We have to make sure we haev good light and the less noise in the background, the better.

Now, here we haev the final version of this rig. We can see it is made with 3D printed parts. It uses step motors to preciselly move the rig in the needed direction. We need 2 motors to rotate the vertical and horizontal axis of the object. We place that object in the middle and using the LCD screen and controls we can start the process. Quite nice, right? As we can see above, they also designed a PCB for this machine that will keep the Arduino, the step motor divers and some other connectors.

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