The £10 Automated 3D scanner

thingiverse

This is a sub £10 3d scanner I liked daveyclk's idea of a simple rotating platform, but didn't want a large printed frame. I also wanted to "set and forget" and leave it to do all the work of taking the photos without my input. I found this rotating plate after designing mine, but would probably have just printed that if I'd found it first: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2710266 If you really want to get sophisticated for a few £ more you could use an arduino nano to start and stop the rotation to allow automated image capture without motion blur. There might also be an advantage of being able to manually speed up or slow down and/or reverse the rotation if you want to get more images in particular areas, but will need more experimentation to be sure. Also I'm planning on adding a simple mechanism to lift the camera up and down, and an additional version to rotate the camera around the model for larger objects (estimated £5 cost). Vitamins: 1x 50rpm motor (eg www.ebay.co.uk/itm/292384463521) 1x 18650 battery (or whatever other battery combo you wish) 20cm of wire switch + potentiometer (optional) 5x skate bearings 4x M8 bolts (or print the included m8 half-axles) 1x 11.5mm o-ring approx 8m of 1.75mm filament Webcam or phone something flat for the rotating plate Admittedly you might want to spend a little more than £3 on a webcam which would then put it over £10, or revert to using a phone but this is just to prove it is possible to make a scanner on a really low budget (providing you don't count the pc for subsequent processing :0 The workflow is: 1. Run your preferred image capture software/app at regular (approx 1sec) intervals while the plate rotates, adjusting the camera height to get all angles of the object. 2. VisualSFM to rebuild the photos into a series of 3d points. 3. Meshlab to convert the points into a mesh (with optional texture file) 4. Print with your favorite host, or 4. Blender to render/animate or modify. Software: PC: Simple Webcam Capture: www.tucows.com/preview/502646 Android: Time Lapse Camera & Time Lapse Video app VisualSFM : ccwu.me/vsfm/ CMVS: github.com/pmoulon/CMVS-PMVS MeshLab: www.meshlab.net/ Blender: www.blender.org/ Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEAbXYDzUjU