3D Scanning to Print (Photogrammetry) October 8, 2019
Posted by stuffilikenet in 3D Printing, Applications, Awesome, Geek Stuff, Photography, Publishing Tools, Star Trek Technology.add a comment
Due to an unfortunate incident while moving from the very parted lips of Hell (Greenville, CA) I have had to replace a few parts on my Casio CDP-120 piano keyboard. Basically, the highest key (C, for those who need to know) was/is smashed and needs a replacement. Aha! I have this iPrusa printer and can whip up a new key post-haste using Fusion360 to measure and design a new key. Right?
No. It’s a part with surprisingly complex geometry, so I thought I would try photogrammetry to create a model and see how that works. I never tried this before, so what could it hurt? Can’t be any harder than Fusion360 to master. Right?
No. There seems to be no (free as in beer) software which can do this which is simple enough for me to install (grumble, grumble) on this company Mac, and I’m not sure company policies built into the security suite on this company Mac would permit it (grumble, grumble) anyway. Since my replacement Windows box isn’t here yet (grumble, grumble) I have to pay for a cloud-based solution…Altizure.com. So I took 56 pictures of the C key an octave down with my cellphone camera, submitted them to Altizure.com‘s loving embrace and was rewarded with a fairly competent render of my key:
I say “fairly competent” because it has lots of hole in the sides. No matter; I can probably fix it in software modify it in Fusion360 to fill in the holes. I will likely need to use Fusion360 to get the dimensions useably correct in any case.
Now I have to steel myself to pay the subscription rate of something like $70 per project. It would be worth it if I was a company making a prototype with great prospects for the future…but I’m not (grumble, grumble).
The key costs about five bucks from Casio’s parts subcontractor, plus six or so to ship it. I know which I am going to choose.
It’s a shame, really; I was looking forward to monkeying around with it. Maybe next time.
However, I don’t give up easily; I got 3DF Zephyr and used the (limited to) 50 pictures in it at the highest defaults in the wizard to create this render:
My army of loyal and discerning readers may notice a bit of degradation here and there…yeah. I will try again, but this took an hour or so and was NOT automatically rendered, but went through stages. In all fairness it would have been shorter if my graphics card had CUDA…but I don’t have a graphics card, just whatever Lenovo thought was cheap but still enough to get by on. Still, it needs work, and it’s midnight. Possibly updates to follow, if I get any sleep.
EXCITING UPDATE:
I got a better render with 50 pictures and the most extreme settings I could figure out:
It’s got the holes that Altizure’s render had, but 3DF Zephyr is free to use. Now I have to figure out how to make the save-able form of this (an .obj file) into an .slt and thence to gcode. With luck, I will have a hideous key to use before my real one arrives.
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang October 2, 2019
Posted by stuffilikenet in Books, Brilliant words.add a comment
A most exhilarating collection of short stories by Mr. Chiang, Exhalation has several completely captivating stories, both in concepts and characters. In one, an archeologist/paleontologist in a Biblically-literal world discovers that their Earth is not the center of the universe, throwing her into a crisis of confidence of, yes, Biblical proportions. In another, a father’s memory is supplemented with electronics and allows him to review his relationship with his daughter, throwing him into a crisis of conscience. In a third, quantum mechanics/many worlds dopplegangers find ways to communicate with highly mixed results.
There are more, but this should be enough to whet your appetite. Link above goes to Amazon, but sfpl.org has it also.
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