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An often overlooked alternative to laser based line generators is the use of 'normal' light. Normal light can be constrained and manipulated into a usable line in much the same way as a laser beam. While the visible line is frequently not as bright or fine as a laser beam, there are several methods available that make ordinary illumination a practical method for 3D scanning.

There are a great number of hardware sources available for line generation – data projectors, slide projectors, coloured filament lights, cold cathode tubes and Luxion LEDs are all viable sources of illumination, and simple shadow-casting can confine the raw illumination to managable proportions. The wide variety of colours available in normal light can be advantageous in chroma-based capture algorithms, and while the confinement of the visible beam is not as clear or fine as a laser, it is possible to use edge based algorithms to detect the variance of the line against target surfaces. It is also possible to construct a variant of the laser painter to generate a visible line using electric motors and a bright source of illumination.

GOING TO PYTHON
The splinescan project is being redesigned from the ground up using PYTHON. I tried experimenting with C but in the end, the programming started to overtake the project, and was becoming inaccessible. Python is an interpreted language, runs on most platforms, is easy to learn and is ideally suited to the scanner project.

V4L
The capture system uses streamer to gather data - While V4L programming was ok to do, there is very little need to reinvent the wheel and streamer does exactly what the project needs it to do.