DIY Scanner, was it worth it?

[Nigel]

Hi All

Having read through the thread on DIY Ciclop scanner building, I have no real impression of how good the scans were.
A number of people seemed to put a great deal of effort into building a scanner, but are they being used? Are the results worthwhile?
Does the scan take too much effort to clean up and consequently the scanner is not used?

Nigel

[dnaman]

I was having trouble getting any kind of point cloud at all ... nothing in the view window and the point cloud files consisted of just the header. I finally did fix that when I (accidentally) got into a calibration run that was a bit more exhaustive than the one I had run (don't know why/how).

But I while I get some kind of image, it's only vaguely reminiscent of the original object. I've put a fair amount of time in so far but probably not nearly what is needed to get acceptable results. And there are so many other things I want to do that the scanner keeps getting pushed on the back burner.

I just hope that this isn't one of those things I've seen in the past where the commercial version works but the public domain version is ..... different.

[stefi]

for the time being i've put my scanner in the spare room, will soon maybe get around to trying to get the dam thing to scan as advertised by bq, has the same laser's, same camera, i pressumme it has the same firmware, same motor, bq zum board, still it has unusable results, tried in dark, near dark, lit and highly lit, lasers are focused, so is the camera, calibration gave good results, had to put it away for now before i chucked the dam thing haha

[clayton]

I am having a problem with the stepper motor ringing currently - so I'm losing torque and it's making quite a bit of noise. I'm not sure if it is the zum board that I soldered myself or not!

[bolsoncerrado]

What driver chip are you using on it clayton?

[clayton]

I've tried the drv8825 and a4988. Played with the voltage pots on both and still getting the resonance in the stepper.

[bolsoncerrado]

Seems many people complained with bad results using the DRV one, so using the A4 sounds the best option. I wonder how many opted for the DRV wrongfully....

[clayton]

I can get it to work with either currently...

[scobo]

Hi All

Having read through the thread on DIY Ciclop scanner building, I have no real impression of how good the scans were.
A number of people seemed to put a great deal of effort into building a scanner, but are they being used? Are the results worthwhile?
Does the scan take too much effort to clean up and consequently the scanner is not used?

Nigel

I just bought the full kit at £219 and after 2 full days of playing around with it, I've got to say I'm slightly disappointed with the end results.
The scanned point clouds are actually fairly decent looking but I can't seemed to get a decent mesh from them.
I'm using Meshlab and Cloudcompare to reconstruct a mesh but the resulting STLs are either lumpy looking or lose a lot of detail compared to the point cloud.

http://i882.photobucket.com/albums/ac28/scobodon/3f75423be2363baff4ec8fa749d2a6b3_zpsgevpledf.jpg (http://s882.photobucket.com/user/scobodon/media/3f75423be2363baff4ec8fa749d2a6b3_zpsgevpledf.jpg.h tml)

http://i882.photobucket.com/albums/ac28/scobodon/cup%20scan%202_zpsrv5fn7zc.jpg (http://s882.photobucket.com/user/scobodon/media/cup%20scan%202_zpsrv5fn7zc.jpg.html)



This one seemed pretty detailed after scanning ....


http://i882.photobucket.com/albums/ac28/scobodon/cat%20light_zps8wpghley.jpg (http://s882.photobucket.com/user/scobodon/media/cat%20light_zps8wpghley.jpg.html)


But the converted mesh (STL file) lost most of the detail ....

http://i882.photobucket.com/albums/ac28/scobodon/mesh_zpsmzmtm2zk.jpg (http://s882.photobucket.com/user/scobodon/media/mesh_zpsmzmtm2zk.jpg.html)

Maybe the conversion method I'm using isn't the best.
Anyone got any tips for converting a point cloud to a mesh ?

[dnaman]

You may be "slightly disappointed" but your results are 20,000% better than mine and in fact better than anything else I've seen.

Perhaps I should post the poor results that I'm getting and see if it rings a bell with someone.

[scobo]

Don't get me wrong, I'm quite pleased with the scanned point clouds, just not sure how to convert this to a mesh properly.

[scobo]

So I've been experimenting with the demo version of David Laserscanner software with the BQ Ciclop camera and one of the lasers.
Got to say, the results are very good although it does require some mesh cleaning and you need to scan the object from several angles then stitch the meshes together to make a complete model but the software does much of this automatically.

[bolsoncerrado]

Wow the fact that David software can make it to work with the BQ Ciclop sounds promising already ;)

[scobo]

I just removed the laser from the Ciclop (you need to move the laser up and down the object by hand) and used it with the Logitech C270 webcam.
I guess you could use the Ciclop turntable and stepper motor to rotate the object you're scanning by sending gcode to the arduino board ??

[thelong]

Played with the voltage pots on both and still getting the resonance in the stepper.

[apollo123]

Today, we don't need to DIY a 3D scanner to do 3D scanning. The price of consumer 3D scanning is already under $500. But it's accuracy is up to 0.3mm.

[artsemlazarchuk]

Thanks for the info guys, I will try to find more options under $500