I’ve got a few projects on my hands at the moment in the Hackademia Lab.
First, I have been working on the home-made 3D scanner with a team for a few weeks now. We made a background and mounted calibration dots on it to correspond to the correct scale of the objects we plan to scan. To do the actual scanning, I volunteered the use of my Canon DSLR, though I wasn’t sure on how to work it. I did a little online research to see that I would need to a) know how to work the camera in video mode and b) have an HDMI cable. As for the video functions, I got the hang of it with the help of the manual, specifically figuring out the funky business of why the shutter stays open then closes randomly, or how to perform auto-focus, or do the (extremely helpful) LCD-zoom for focusing the camera with utmost accuracy. I would like to attribute my fine eye for focusing lenses back to darkroom photography and my countless days spent staring at crisp grains of silver on plastic. I wish we were allowed the same fine focusing of the projector we’re using to perform the scan, as you’ll see in this picture, the projector makes things a bit tricky.
Calibrating the projector with my DSLR, notice fancy cup!
After we calibrated the focus, another group member ran the scanning software to calibrate it with the computer. That’s where those fun little lines come from on the image above! The calibration process is easy to run, but not as easy to set up. The camera and projector have to be arranged at specific angle differences for it to work, the board & calibration dots have to be exactly facing the camera, and then we still get problems within the software of misread angles, thus affecting our point clouds. The actual scanning process is barely harder than the calibration: it takes about the same amount of time and it looks the same with the scan lines going. On our first try a week or two ago, we attempted to scan a bag of coffee beans. One factor we didn’t take into account was that the bag was made of reflective plastic, and reflective material messes with the scan big-time. The only things the point cloud definitively picked up were the matte-paper logo and the curled top of the bag. From here on out, it’s going to be all about getting the scanner to make a more accurate point cloud.
As for my individual project, I have started working on the Knock Block, seen here at Instructables: http://www.instructables.com/id/Knock-Block/
I hunted down all of the electronics on the creators’ list, but I’ve already noticed they leave a few things out. I’m glad our lab has basic stuff like alligator clips laying around. The instructions contain a picture of the actual setup of the Arduino as well as a circuit diagram. As I’m not an Electrical Engineer and I haven’t taken physics since AP in my senior year, the circuit diagram is a bit more of a stretch to understand. I find myself looking at their real picture more than the diagram. They aren’t easy to understand, and if you Google search “understanding beginner circuit diagrams” or the like, I haven’t come across any tutorials yet. Here is where I left off in the lab on Monday evening:
This is my best guess at how the squiggles on the circuit diagram are supposed to look in real life.
And the last project I’m working on is assisting my friend with getting to know the 3D printer. We thought the first place to start would be at the software, and since the lab has a Makerbot 3D printer, we went to Makerbot Technology’s website for answers. Solidworks would have been the best to learn 3D modeling, but we’re students and they don’t even give students a limited-time free trial, so we had to go the free route. We raced each other to see who could download Google Sketchup and add the necessary plugin for 3D printing first. My friend is a PC user, I’m a Mac user, and we both ran into a lot of frustrating problems for maybe a half an hour. I broke the cycle by looking deeply at the Makerbot website instructions, downloading a different version of the plugin, and adding it manually via the program preferences. Now to learn Sketchup…
Little did Mr. Smiley Pants know his creator looked down on him for being disappointingly two-dimensional...
Stay curious,
Julia
