Stacy DeRuiter's How To Make Almost Anything Blog - Week Eight

3D scanning and printing

Monday, November 7, 2005

This week's assignment is to scan and print a 3D object. I have decided that I will use the Zcorp printer, which makes plaster-type objects rather than plastic ones, but I haven't gotten to work on the assignment yet.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

This morning I scanned 2 objects: a snowbaby christmas ornament (made of white porcelain) and a little wooden monster head. I also cleaned up both scans (filling all the holes, etc.). The snowbaby did not turn out nearly as well as the monster, even though the individual scans of the snowbaby looked much more complete. John helped out a lot, and we were not able to get the snowbaby patched up without doing a lot of smoothing and cleaning on the scan, which basically removed all the texture and interesting features of the ornament - the final product looked a bit like a white blob, barely recognizable unless you had the original nearby for comparison. The monster (despite the fact that it was completely covered with shiny metal leaf, and we were told that shiny stuff generally does not scan well) came out much better, so I decided to print that.



Friday, November 10, 2005

The monster came out just fine! It didn't have a solid bottom, and I accidentally cleared out part of the inside as I was cleaning it up, but it does not seem to have broken (at least not today) and it does bear a reasonable likeness to the original. Hurrah! The printing on the Zcorp printer was much easier than the scanning process.



Tom and I also spent a long time today working on plans to update and improve the dvm we started last week. We figured out plans (the circuit) to make a sort of homemade sigma-delta ADC using the tiny13's comparator, allowing for digital volt measurements with user-controlled (well, asm-code-controlled) speed and precision, but we didn't build the board or write the asm code that would run it. This weekend, Tom did almost all the work on making a Tk gui for the dvm we designed last week.