• Code
• Concepts
• Hardware
• Mathematics

There are four principal areas of development in the splinescan project.

A wide variety of hardware can be used with project splinescan. The motor controlled prototype uses a Milford serial port controlled stepper motor ( Bipolar Stepper Driver/Motor Combo, Part # 5-595 at £49.00 each ) and controller to control the turntable. This item is no longer stocked by maplin electronics, but is still available from Milford Instruments. Low RPM motors, lasers, light sources and cameras all fall into this section

The python code interfaces with the cameras, motors and all other necessary hardware. The goal of the scanner code is to capture a series of coherent images from the camera, recognise significant line features and translate the features into x,y co-ordinates, color information and reflectance information. The data from this layer is transmitted to the Modelling system and reconstructed in a format that a 3D package can understand

The overall model of how the scanner will function is important, and the conceptual aspects of project splinescan are dealt with here. Projected goals, usability, documentation and the OpenSource methodology are all as valuable to the project as the code and hardware itself.

The process of scanning, image manipulation and 3D modelling is very processor intensive. The quality of the output models is entirely dependent on the accuracy and efficiency of the algorithms used to interpret the source data.

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.