You're a coin photographer. You have an extremely, extremely valuable coin, and it needs to be photographed with a meticulous amount of resolution. Let's say this is the coin.
And you consider this an acceptable amount of detail:
Okay, so you just go ahead and grab your $48,000, 400 megapixel camera, your magically wide-field, extended-depth-of-field macro lens, and some other third thing you don't have, and the picture gets taken, boom, Easy peezy.
Right. But what would you do if you couldn't do that, like me? What are your options?
It's not a trick, you can do it, and it's not really super complicated either.
Okay, I guess it is a trick, and if you've read the title or watched the video, you know already what it is. The trick is that, instead of having to pick between magnification and field of view, you bypass the issue entirely: You start at whatever magnification that you want, and then physically move the subject or camera to cover all of your ground.
Thankfully, when we say "move your object or camera to cover more ground", we do not mean by hand. That's where the motorization comes in. Once you set a scan, that happens autonomously --- whether you want to take a few hundred pictures in a couple of minutes or a million in a couple of days. And again, like we said in the title: not just in two, but up to three dimensions.
Repeat if desired --- 40 times, in this case.
Quick disclaimer: This is not the most effective method for people doing 3D photogrammetry, at least not yet. If you can, it's usually much easier to just take a picture of the subject in one shot. That said, it is absolutely possible to produce 3D models by doing repeated 2D scans!
There are a lot of ways you can actually implement a scanner like this in practice, and the available rewards reflect that. I started this project during my Master's degree in biomedical engineering more than two years ago now, and had budget and size as absolute priorities. I ended up basing the entire system around two old Playstation-3 Blu-Ray drives and the cheapest USB microscope I could find:
My intended application was for in-incubator, timelapse scans of living animal cells. Then, I got distracted by a tiny little linear stepper motor from inside the Blu-Ray player, which is normally used to move a single lens back and forth. Could you use that to move a stage, like for a coverslip?
And then if you're already doing that, what's the reason you can't clip in an even tinier little rotary stepper motor and lift that up instead?
And so, several years and thousands of 3D printed parts later, the design was polished and put to work as a 3D scanning microscope for small things, made almost entirely out of Blu-Ray players.
(I'm spinning a tiny 3D-printed Kim-Jong Un head, I hope he doesn't mind).
And don't think it's just for 3D scanning; you can absolutely set it up to 2D scanning, as long as it fits on the platform!
In more recent times, I've switched over to trying to optimize scanning for serious users. My new system is based on a CNC or 3D printer, which I call LadyBug Beefy. You can read about it over on my Hackaday blog, but just consider it the Blu-Ray version's bigger, sturdier twin, and with a better camera! It even has a fifth axis, allowing you to really "fly" around the thing you're inspecting:
LadyBug Beefy
LadyBug Beefy is the odd one out in the rewards, because the bulk of it is modified from an existing commercial product. As such, it can look really different depending on how it's made, and what you want it to do:
It's even possible to do active machine vision, for instance if you want to follow things around:
My plan is to base the final system on a core "XYZ" gantry printer --- where only the camera moves in the linear dimensions, making it much easier to mount your object when doing 2D scanning. If you are seriously interested in this, please reach out to me directly, and I will give you some one-on-one support.
Finally, the last available main reward tier is the most experimental, but with a design that I hope will appeal to a special set of users. Lots of people have good cameras and optics, and I wanted to make an entry-level device to help them do 2D and 3D micro-scanning. I basically took the four motors from the Classic DIY and put them all on one block, turning it into an independent stage --- just point your camera at the moving object and program it to move in sync with your shutter!
Again, this is somewhat experimental, and I still plan to upgrade key parts to be more useful for conventional photographers. But if you see the value as a tool for your existing camera, absolutely you should go for it! And expect me to reach out to learn some of the details of your camera setup.
Future Plans and Fulfillment
Despite my best efforts to graduate, I'm still a part-time student. I had originally planned to launch at the beginning of April, not June, which would have given me a solid summer to travel, source difficult parts from their origin, and work with manufacturers to build as much as possible before returning in the Fall to finish assembly and start shipping out. Then, in case you didn't notice, the world stopped working, and plans had to change.
Not all of it is a bad thing. Thanks to the PPE shortage, I got a lot of experience farming out parts:
Basically, I'm preparing to first manufacture the Classic and DIY kits, which are close to their final production forms, in-house --- literally at my house, with my own printers and soldering iron and two hands. Fulfillment of the Beefy and Platform versions, which require more specialized parts and some remaining development, will commence afterwards. This plan is good up to one or two multiples of the funding goal, but in the case of a runaway success we may have to reevaluate.
You've reached the end of the story, congratulations! Whether you want to share the campaign or pledge for a Beefy or the $1 digital rewards or nothing at all, that's okay. You don't have to buy anything at all to make one of these, and I don't expect everyone to want one anyway. But I hope that it inspired you in some way, or you giggled at parts of the video. Those were my intention, and if you follow along on the project you'll get way more where that came from.
Thanks for looking, and have a great day!
Risks and challenges
I think probably all first-time launchers share a similar sentiment: I am absolutely terrified of both success and failure. If I fail, it's my fault. If I succeed, it's my *responsibility*. I want to succeed, of course. But I also really, really don't want to let my backers down.
Here are the things that I can promise directly from me and no one else:
1: I will work my absolute hardest to listen to my backers,
2: I will be transparent as I can, in times of both success and hardship,
3: And I will deliver. If not on time, then at all, as long as I am still breathing.
These clams should be at least the minimum, so let's talk specifics at where we expect to see challenges:
First, there are consequences of the pandemic. I've already talked a bit about this in the story, but basically I am preparing to manufacture in-house, to be flexible with the choice in some components, and have adjusted the delivery dates. I don't know what the future will hold, though --- nobody does. See promises one through three above.
Next, there's getting the whole user experience up to snuff for the public. LadyBug started as a concept, then a laboratory prototype, and has gradually become more polished. But it's still not the easiest thing to use. I don't want to delay a great system from getting into people's hands while I try to make it perfect, so expect there to be a round of software updates after the first feedback comes in. With that, if you'd like to be a beta tester, feel free to apply!
Lastly --- you know what? Let's just say I'm leaving this one reserved for a later date. I don't know what it is, but I'm sure something will come up. See promises one through three!