Young Engineer Uses Webcam, Laser to Build Budget 3-D Scanner [Republished]

Using little more than a webcam and a laser, a young engineer has built a cheap 3D scanner that dovetails perfectly with the Makerbot and other desktop fabricators.

It would be used as element of a copying system that might allow hobbyists to copy solid objects at home.

\” The technology exists to try this form of thing, nonetheless it\’s far more expensive,\” said Andy Barry, a research engineer inside the Autodesk Innovations Lab at NASA Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, California. \” My goal is to make it really cheap, as a way to build a million of them, and get it out to everybody.\”

Barry built the first model in barely three weeks, in the course of the beginning of his senior year at Olin College of Engineering. During his winter vacation, he constructed a second prototype. At Ames this summer, he has been using it to scan people\’s faces and then print plastic replicas.

That could appear impractical, but he brought up that an identical technique can be used to switch damaged plastic goods.

\” You may have a car part that\’s broken, you glue it back together and put it in front of the scanner,\” and then you definately can use that data to machine a replacement part, said Barry.

The scanner works by sweeping a red laser beam across any object that you may put in front of a webcam. When an object is just about the camera, the beam seems to shifted to the side. That gives a key bit of data concerning the depth of the point being scanned. With a bit number crunching, a computer can use the placement of the beam to calculate the thickness of that object.

Barry hopes to sell his invention throughout the MakerBot store for a value of around $200. It may be available early this autumn.

Photo credit: Aaron Rowe

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