Bob
]]>Meanwhile, I've got it plugged into a very inconveniently located Windows 7 real hardware machine with the scanner on a temporary perch. It does seem to be working on real hardware - I decided to go for broke and am scanning a ceramic elephant I had laying around that just barely fits on the bed. So far about 1/2 of an elephant appears to be taking shape on the computer screen, so it seems to be functioning well for my first scan.
]]>2. Arduino Leonardo drivers would not install (they should do so automatically when you install the software). After much messing around I found a USB port on my Dell Precision laptop that would work (it set itself to COM 8 by the way). That specific port is the only one that works.
3. You are forced to calibrate the machine before use. It would not calibrate. It kept saying the room was too dark. I brought it into bright sunlight and still no go. Camera LEDs were on (can peek inside a little) so I figured more driver problems. Device manager said drivers for Logitech C-270 webcam were installed, so I went to Logitech's website and downloaded the webcam app for a C-270 (my laptop does not have a webcam). Running the logitech app showed what the camera was looking at, so the camera was working.
Closed that app and launched the Matterform app and now all is well. Whatever.
4. Scanning uses very little computer power. You can do other things (SolidWorks will not mess it up). Meshing the point cloud to create an STL takes more horsepower. 3 of the 4 cores run at ~50% at about 5Gb of RAM.
5. Something like a shot glass will take maybe 15 minutes at medium resolution. 5 minutes to clean things up. 10 minutes more to mesh and create an STL if you wish. Big things make smoother scans. Combining multiple scans prior to meshing can help smooth, but you may lose small details.
The attached pic is of a 2" tall part. Native STL on the right, scan of high res SLA on the left. This is a 1st attempt.
]]>Bob
]]>Have to sign for it and all.
Yea, that is somewhat irritating. Not only do they require me to sign (which I can see them wanting), but the fedex web site won't even allow me to have it held at a fedex location so I can sign for it there when I get home. I probably would have stayed home to begin playing with it as soon as possible anyway, but it is annoying to be forced to do so :-).
]]>Bob
]]>Looks like next week I'll be able to discover just how difficult it is to get USB pass through working with libvirt on Fedora so I can run the matterform software in a Windows 7 virtual machine. I don't have great hopes since one of the things that has to pass through is a webcam, but maybe qemu has improved since the last time I tried this.
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