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A home-made 3D laser scanner would complement this nicely.
by dhughes 15y ago
A home-made 3D laser scanner would complement this nicely.
- radicalbyte 15y agoAs would a 3d CNC router: scan with the scanner, print it roughly, then the router cuts it to high quality perfection.
- bri3d 15y agoIt seems that movement hasn't been as rapid in hobby CNC machines as in 3D printers, probably because CNC machines are a lot more expensive. Good CNC usually requires two tool-tilt axes in addition to the standard X, Y, and Z - for a total of 5 axes, and everything has to be a lot stronger to apply enough pressure to the tool without warping. Hopefully once everyone has a 3D printer they'll use it to print some CNC parts and kick that movement into gear... With that said, a 3D printer can be repurposed into a very weak 3-axis router pretty easily. Provided you move the tool head slowly enough and are cutting something very weak, they work okay. The fundamental concept (having a computer move a tool head) is the same - 3D printers are just built out of weaker/smaller (and hence cheaper) parts.
- bborud 15y agowhat I'm longing for is a good G-code generator that is affordable, runs on my Linux or OSX, can generate toolpaths for milling as well as 3D printing and can work with files from Sketchup. (Most makers I know don't use Windows and I think there is a huge opportunity for a polished product that will run on either Linux or OSX)
- windsurfer 15y agoFYI: sketchup doesn't support linux yet.
- bborud 15y agoI know, but since I will be using either EMC2 on Linux or Grbl on an Arduino to run the G-code, I can live with CAM software that runs on Linux.
- Kliment 15y agoSlic3r is an interesting project that goes in that direction. Only for printing though. You can feed it an STL exported from sketchup and it will generate a toolpath. And of course it's all on github and completely free and opensource and multiplatform. The major problem with it is that sketchup is a mesh editor, not a solid editor, so it sometimes exports geometrically impossible (non-manifold) objects.