Fricken Laser.....Projectors

Write here about construction, ideas, equipment, tips n tricks etc. related to structured light scanning
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Micr0
Posts: 586
Joined: 15 Nov 2016, 15:20
Location: New York City

Fricken Laser.....Projectors

Post by Micr0 »

Home theater projectors are not ideal for SL scanning for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is that these projectors are designed to focus on a planer surface that is normal in one axis to the projector. Due to their primary function and cost concerns, these projector have lenses that aren't exactly great. Certainly not great for what we do. Therefore, I was very interested in trying one of the new Laser based projectors that have recently started becoming cheep enough to use for SL scanning. The idea is that they would eliminate the distortion or errors that are caused at the near and far edges of the scan envelop buy the projected pattern losing focus. Laser projectors are supposed to be focus free at any distance. Last weekend I was able to get my hands on the UO Smart beam 720p projector. I had high hopes for this. the projector was very small, had no keystoning (projected straight on), and it was battery powered (with a 2 hr life). So with wifi enabled it was completely wireless. I was able to fairly easily get it set up and David had no trouble seeing it and projecting the patterns through it. It went through calibration fine but... When I took the first scan..... the surface finish of the scan was horrible. it looked like fine steel wool. or coarse sand. U tried different shutter speeds and frame rates. I tried everything I could think of and the surface never got better. There were so many errors that many edges and features of the model were missing or rough. In short, it was totally unusable. I tried to see if the depth of the scanning envelope was better and with what I could get out of it, this seemed to be the case. However the scan was so bad I couldn't really tell. Now this could be due the the way laser light is coherent and regular projector light sources are not. It also could be the way the image is created via DLP. There are laser projectors that are scanning and don't use DLP. I want to get a hold of one of those to try and see if it makes a difference. I really hoped this was going to work better.

More to come.
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Oteck
Posts: 82
Joined: 11 Nov 2016, 21:21

Re: Fricken Laser.....Projectors

Post by Oteck »

I was actually looking at that but i know it won't be sufficient. Looking to replace my acer with something more aswell and found this.
I'm still reading up but may drop them a line on what i do need

http://keynotephotonics.3dcartstores.co ... _p_41.html
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