Robocular -Affordable 3d scanner


I'm no engineer, but I don't think 3D scanning leads to very good results in general.

It's the same problem as when you try to vectorize raster graphics. You don't get a straight line where there should be a straight line, but only an approximation of that line.

That means for the result to be good your scan needs to have a way higher resolution than your 3d print/milling machine. If you print a raster image which is 500x500 pixels with 400x400 pixels the result won't be that great - same here. And machines driven by stepper motors (I think most servos are actually similar to stepper motors too, just with the added bonus of measuring it's position) can't just change their resolution, if your model has 100 dots per cm and the machine 80 then you need to scale it in software.

They claim that their accuracy is better than 0.15mm. That's plenty for most art (as long as it's not something like that nice stuff by Tinguely) if you do some clean up work after you machined your model (but without cleanup you might see+feel the inaccuracies depending on the material).

But if you need something to be really accurate, then it's not enough. 3D printers can be at least as accurate as this scanners. Even extremely cheap self built milling machines do better than 0.15mm and if you have something somewhat professional (say $2000) then that can easily go to 0.001mm.

If you have, say, a gear then you really need that kind of accuracy. For a case of a console you don't absolutely need 0.001mm of accuracy, but I bet the big manufacturers make them more accurate than 0.05mm.

I wonder what the specs are for the Pandora molds, that's something we could find out if we asked ED, but I would bet a lot that even they ( :p ) are better than 0.15mm for the molds (not necessarily for the cases themselves, I fear, but we see the result. And the error in the cases is less annoying than random noise of 0.15mm because you still get an acceptable surface, it's just maybe stretched a bit. Maybe it the error of this 3d scanner isn't random noise, but I think it would make sense when you think about how it works and I generally just tend to assume the worst possible thing without the seller lying).
 
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