A DIY project for building a scanner. The ingredients that make up the scanner are a webcam, some Lego bricks and milk. Milk? What does milk have to do with the scanner here?
Lets look at how it’s built. The Lego bricks used to hold a webcam. The webcam is positioned to look down on a plastic box, where the object to be scanned is placed. And milk is used to fill up the plastic box slowly in order to provide the object a high-contrast background.
The webcam tracks the changing outline of the object from above as it is slowly covered with milk. The series of outlines are layered together by software to produce a 3D model. Neat idea? I suggest to build a Lego NXT Robot to automatically pour the milk into the plastic box, which makes it more convenient to use.
September 21st, 2009 at 3:42 am
[...] or portable type which the user needs to use it shoot on a subject for a number of times, and the scanner then pieces the data together to form a 3D model. It also comes with the ZScan lite software which [...]
January 31st, 2010 at 9:42 am
[...] does. It’s now available and costs only $140. The idea of this HoverCam is similar to the DIY Lego/milk scanner or iPhone document scanner that we’ve seen [...]
June 3rd, 2010 at 7:14 am
[...] bricks have been used to make a number of useful equipments including router, scanner and printer. It’s another printer here, made entirely out of Lego bricks and it’s a [...]