Re: Digitizer Arm

Dick,

I don't think you're missing anything. When ya gonna build it?

Several years ago I designed what I hoped would be my "path to
millions". Dollars, that is.

A Desktop 3d scanner for the "then" do-it-yourself modeling and
gamers and "gee whiz" early adopters...

Two steppers. One rotates a "table" (disk)about 8" dia. 2nd is
driving a vertical leadscrew which raised and lowered the "sensing
head" which was a laser range finder as discussed in this thread
earlier. Used a cheap "pancake" stepper(15 degree/step) for this
since the operation was:

Place object to be scanned on table. Press GO.
Sensor head starts at bottom of "post". Table is stepped one rotation
(200 or 400 "readings" are taken from the head. Raise the sensor assy
one "notch" and repeat. Serial port data stream. End result is a FOD
(field of dots). Nice item.

At the time, I had no programmer to work with to implement a REAL
interface and market quality S/W. Also, the CAD packages that could
understand "point-clouds" (my FOD) were priced in the thousands of
dollars. And the laser part was expensive. So it died. I'm still
poor :-(

Ballendo

>I wonder if the object being scanned were rotated - would the probe
>still need to be normal to the surface? One could generate a series
>of x and y coordinate plus an angle of rotation - what am I missing
>here?
>Dick