Hello all:
I am looking for ShopBot users input and interest level for a 3D scanner for your machine.
In the late 1990's I developed and received patents (#5,910,845 and #5,978,092) for a high speed non-contact laser scanner.
As my money ran short, I had an opportunity to start a small electronics design and contract manufacturing business. My time was consumed by that, and little scanner development took place.
I bought a ShopBot that I used to clip the leads on over a million light emitting diodes for the variable message traffic sign boards that we built. The manufacturing end of the business dried up as my customer move production to Taiwan.
Since then, scanner development picked up as the software has been converted from DOS to Windows, and the hardware has been upgraded.
The "scan head" consists of a video camera, and a pair of laser line generators. The scan head requires precision linear motion that the ShopBot provides quite nicely.
The scanner can be positioned for scanning objects on the ShopBot table, or 90 degrees from the table for scanning human faces (which I have done a lot of) ,or other objects.
The scan head that I use for scanning objects on the ShopBot table, scans a vertical area of about 8 inches. That is, if you attach a video monitor (recommended) to the scanner, you would see an 8 inch vertical area on the screen.
The accuracy of that scanner head is approximately .02 inch in the Y dimension. The X dimension resolution is dependant on how fast the ShopBot moves the scan head while capturing an object image. Moving 1 inch per second yield a .0166 inch X resolution. The Z resolution for the X/Y point is roughly .005 inch. Scan heads for objects such as faces are calibrated for a vertical area of about 18 inches and have a Y resolution of about .045 inch.

The software produces .sbp files or Gcode files. The user can specify the size and resolution of the carving to be produced, as well as the diameter and length of the tool to use.
Several options are available for carving in, out, reversing image, etc., as well as some tool protection options to prevent tool breakage if a large plunge is encountered. There is really too much to try to describe here in this initial forum note. If you have some interest, I can provide more information, or provide a feature you might want.
There is a lot of software still to be completed.
The visual display software needs a lot of work. Software to combine multiple scans needs to be written that will allow larger objects to scanned (larger than the 8 Y inch example).

My target is a product that costs under $3,000.00. That is a lot better than the $20K+ cost of other comparable scanners. Having a ShopBot to provide the linear motion saves a LOT of cost.
Hopefully, there will be some interest out there in the ShopBot world. If not I still have a very cool tool for myself.
Thanks,
Tom Brown