Matt Blackshaw

Week 7: 3D Scanning and Printing

Dodecahedron revisited

The idea

This week I 3D scanned and printed the dodecahedron I created in Week 1 on the laser cutter.

3D scanning

John helped me use the Minolta scanner. It is truly amazing and I got a great scan on my first try. The point cloud is below.

Filling the holes...

Geomagic is, well, sort of magic... I had to manually fill ~180 holes in my model before it was watertight and ready for printing. Fortunately the fill hole function in Geomagic managed to fill all my holes without too much trouble. The mesh and filled model is below.

3D printing

To print the file I saved it as an STL and handed it over to Tom. A few days later... Voila!

CT scanning

I also attended the CT scanning session this week and we took a look inside an iPhone. We also called the iPhone while it was inside the CT scanner... You could see the vibration motor spinning (see video below)!