I can't find the darned link or video, but the guy uses a cheap line laser along with a rotary table and a web camera. That gets you the scan of whatever and then you need to put  the different scanning together with software.That is the part that cost's some $ ...I think the software was $500 to do it. In the end you get a 3d image out of it which can be be saved as a steel file. Accuracy was quite good. In fact there was a 1 hour TV show on laser scanning ,  within the last year or so,where he went through the whole thing and how it was all done...may have been one of  educational TV  channel.

Ring a bell to anyone out there?

RICH

I assumed laser scanning was way too complicated and expensive?   Am I missing something?   About the only thing I have considered is shooting a laser at the object and taking pictures at 45deg angle and using them as bit map backgrounds to trace contours.   I have seen this done at a museum using fancy software.    I wouldn't have a clue where to find a suitable laser that I could afford.

Jack

Art wrote a plugin to do video/laser probing with a $30 laser pointer . AND a point cloud generator to go with it. May be more of what you are looking for.

Look Here  http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/board,67.0.html

Hope that helps, (;-) TP

Here is a link to the company that was on the TV show.
http://www.david-laserscanner.com

You may want to go to cnc zone as they have some posts on laser scanning for CNC.

I did a lot of searching at one time to find out how accurate a laser scan of a chemical  facillity would turn out and didn't want to be BS'd by some follks.
If memory is right for cnc it was around .005" or so from a foot away. BTW, it would be interesting to go to a dental place that does the work since that's
how false teeth are manufactured today.

In all of this though, I think the important thing is the magic wand which converts the scan into a usable file.
 
RICH
 

Rich,

I'm aware of "David" which is very limited and has been around for a while.    Dentists use a scanner but they don't have much size capability. I use a dental lab to do my 3D printing and probably ask about their scanning capability.   I have farmed out scanning, both laser and white light, and they are very expensive but in the case of the laser very accurate.     The big problem was converting the resultant stl file to a nurbs model.   I spent many hours one one of the projects.    What I did was to do a numbrer of mesh splits and develop cross sections from the edges where the mesh was split.   

I may well just use the router to manually take off point coordinates from the parts.   Not fun but gets the job done.

I have found Mach3 very useful but my main issue with it is that information on the various wizards is sketchy at best and wading through many forums and yet many more posts seems quite cumbersome and in many cases hasn't answered my question as is the case in this thread.   If only there was a reasonable way to sort out the facts and organize them in an easy to access manner.

Jack

THe basic wizard is VERY simple you tell it the width and length of the scan. The max depth of Z to scan. Then add in the stepovers for X and Y (Resolution) and then the Wizard will generate a Gcode File that does all the probing work.

At the start of the Program RUN it asks for a file name to save to. AND at teh completion of the run it closes and saves the file.

THAT process will generate a POINTS file of the scan in XYZ format. Then I woul duse MachMesh to convert that into a STL or mesh file. Then use your favorite Mesh to do what ever.

I think I got the order right, (;-) TP

MachMesh

to convert that into a STL
MachMesh ....never heard of MachMesh

RICH

I think that should be MACHCLOUD  (;-)

(;-) TP

Where does the wizard output the probing data?

Solved it: since I was using the lathe probing wizard I was missing the M40 and M41 Visual Basic calls for choosing an output file.
I just copied them from the Mill folder and now it works!