Open3DScanner – ***Insert pun about cutting (final cut?, making the cut?,something mustard related?)***

Spent the weekend in St Neots visiting my friend Pete where we drank heavily and sellotaped mobile phones to kites (A blog post on that later). Took the day off on Monday and we both travelled down to London and did some laser cutting on a machine rented at blueprint model shop. Here are some photos of the cut parts:

As kind of expected a bunch of stuff is slightly wrong with the parts, but nothing that can’t be easily fixed.

It’s bloody awesome seeing something I’ve spent so long designing on a computer in actual-real life. Alas there’s plenty of work left to do on the software and electronics side of things, but it’s nice to have made this milestone.

3D Scanner Mk 3 – Lasering Time!

The 3D scanner hasn’t made much progress in the past month or so, due mainly to me putting off doing the last bit of boring work to get it ready for laser cutting. After drinking a load of Tesco own brand energy drink last night I decided to get all the fiddly bits done, and so here is the final 3D model and the layout of the parts for cutting:

The parts have now flown through the intertubes over to cutlasercut to get a quote for the cutting, and hopefully, if it doesn’t bankrupt me, I’ll be getting all the parts cut soon! wooo!

On a side note, after getting some good feedback on the introduction to markov chains I wrote I’m hoping to do another one that covers another interesting area of artificial intelligence in the near future.

Belated Report of Happenings

Been meaning to get the ol’ blog updated for a while but what with shooting to and fro between Manchester and London and the crappy Internet (spell check is bitchin at me to capitalize “Internet”, since when was it a proper noun? and more importantly when did i start giving a damn about spelling?) connection I’ve been getting i haven’t gotten around to it….TILL NOW!

3D Scanner
Done a little more work on the (soon to be OpenSource/Creative Commons) 3D Scanner project. Just need one final push to get the door done and add the nut fixings on the other side of the bolt holes and then it should be ready for sending the design off to the laser cutters and doing some actual physical building!



The odd looking bit sticking out the side is the camera mounting (I’m going to use a PS3 Eye). It’s on movable rails to allow for adjustments for the field of view of the camera (PS3 Eye has 2 settings), a concertina type cardboard/cloth covering is going to be between the camera housing and the main body of the scanner to prevent light entering.

Robot Arm
Got the robot arm working over Christmas, i even have a crappy phone video of it in action i’ve been meaning to upload but haven’t due to aforementioned Internet woes.
Next step will be a total strip down, clean, and rebuild. Looks like some of the actuators have gummed up a bit, and most of the joints are a bit on the creaky side. Will then start looking into some kind of (most probably arduino based) computer interface and then a set of libraries for inverse kinematics and the like (although ROS looks like a promising alternative to a custom library)

Clock
While home over Christmas and browsing through an awesome book my brother got me for Christmas (“507 Mechanical Movements”) I got inspired to try and make (another) clock using some odd mechanical assemblies.



The designs not finished, and it probably never will be due to a couple of flaws, but it was an interesting exercise and I’ll hopefully get around to working on a mark 2 at some point in the near future (probably once i’ve finished the 3D scanner).

3D Scanner Mk 3 – More work in progress

Heres a picture of the latest version of the new 3D scanner design, the view is from the underside showing the gear train to the scanning platform (designed using extensive help from this website).



The gear ratio is 3 to 1 giving 600 steps per revolution from a standard 200 steps per revolution stepper motor, this will be a pretty big increase to the radial scanning resolution which has never been great in the previous versions of the scanner. There’s still plenty of work to do before the design can be sent to the laser cutters, but i’m managing to chip away at bits and pieces when i have free moments.
All the plans and 3D models are going to be stuck up on git hub at some point under a creative commons license, although i’m probably going to wait until the design is mostly finished before i do that.

Work in Progress

Here’s a quick picture of the latest iteration of my 3D scanner. I’m using caduntu and openscad for the designing.

3D Scanner Software – First Results

Heres one of the first results of the new and improved 3D scanner software:

Theres still plenty of bugs to iron out in the software, but when thats all done i’ll make an “offical” first release of the software which will be available here at the google code repo.
I’m going to try and get a number of different builds available as well (64bit GNU/Linux, 32bit GNU/Linux, and a Windows release).

Also here’s a quick look at the new portable 3D scanner being made: