This month held in stock some major redesign and changes. After continued problems with Autodesk ReCap Photo, I switched to trying 3DF Zephyr software to create the model. This also had issues and was unsuccessful in creating a scan. But, this software allowed me to see what the issue was. It placed the pictures in the environment which allowed me to see where it thought the photos were. The photos were all stacked on one another leading me to believe that the software is looking at the background. It uses cues in the background to orient the camera. I looked to see if I could manually input camera locations but was not able to accomplish this.

This is what led to the redesign. I have now made a module that involves the camera spinning around the object, instead of a rotating object. This design poses problems for the raspberry pi and camera as I don’t have a slip ring available nor wanted to try to implement the amount of wires necessary. With this, I opted to utilize a cell phone camera. With this redesign, I am also able to utilize a slider component that will allow me to change the focal distance much easier. While the design is not as replicable currently, I am hoping that once this proof of concept comes to fruition, and I have a complete scan, I will be able to go back and make it more replicable in a home shop or other small scale shop.

Hopefully I will be able to have a scan in the coming week and will be able to make some minor tweaks. I am excited to have a working and functional design, but I will currently be sacrificing the ease of motorized control of rotation. But, using a stepper and some sort of belt drive I believe I could make it rotation controllable. This would then allow expansion into a mechanism such as a selfie stick with remote shutter that would allow the phone and the rotation to communicate and take pictures at intervals. This may not be in the near future as school is wrapping up and finals inbound, but definitely something I will carry over into the summer.