Week Eight: 3D Scanning and 3D Printing

This week's assignment was to scan something and 3D print something. We were encouraged to scan something simple so we wouldn't have too much trouble trying to patch up holes, so I decided to scan a mini-Common Cold virus from Giant Microbes. I used the Minolta 3D scanner and interfaced with it using the Geomagic software. I first did 4 scans, 90 degrees apart, and then tried 8 scans, 45 degrees apart...the results were pretty similar. One thing of interest was that the camera didn't autofocus on the common cold too well (maybe because it's fuzzy?), so I just remembered where it focused with the focus shelf thing and typed it in manually.

On the third attempt at getting a nicer scan, I bounced light off the glass wall and raised the platform a bit and this gave me a better scan.

I had to repair a lot of holes in this guy, mostly on the top and bottom. I think the software got confused about the tag and also filled up a not-actually-there hole there.

On the 3D printing end of things, I decided to print something that I couldn't actually machine, so I cadded up a companion cube with the heart in a cavity inside of it. I made the model in Solidworks, and made the heart piece in two pieces because Solidworks doesn't like curves as much and mating two pieces was actually easier than making it one piece.

Something like 48 hours later, and I had a companion cube in my hand! I actually saw a cross section of it from the night before when I saw it going back and forth in the Invision printer, and it seemed like some of the bigger chunks are hollow inside. The wax support didn't quite get out of all the edges, so I stuck it back in the oven for another 10 minutes at 150 F. I think more time in the oven and flipping it so the wax could drip out would've helped, but I was impatient and just scraped it all out.

The heart turned out really well! I can shake my cube around and it won't fall out and such. I tried to get a few pictures of how the heart actually isn't connected to anything inside:

Here are links to the .stl files, in case you want to print your own! [common cold] [companion cube]