Might have cracked this. I took an old flatbed scanner apart and disabled the light on the scanner head. I then took an object and laid it on the flatbed and put a pice of paper over the top of it. While the scanner was scanning the object I held an LED flashlight above the paper. The results were OK, and I’ll move on to the next stage and put a lightbox on top to give a consistent white background to scan against.
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That looks viable!
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leave the scanner light on and just lift off the lid instead.
Will give you a much better scan to have vectorised.
I scan objects on my flatbed all the time to get the outline. If they are really curvy 3D, like a microphone, I get the general outline, then tweak it using calipers to get the exact width in places that came out a bit blurry. It helps to cover the object with a light colored cloth to keep the light contained, otherwise it gets too much outside light from above and gets washed out.
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I wonder if you could simply hold your object in front of a piece of graph paper and take a photo of the shadow from behind. The more collimated the light the better, sunlight is quite collimated and free too. Of course, you’d want to pay special attention to make sure the paper is perpendicular to the sun.
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I have done that in a pinch or for large objects…put in a reference object like a ruler. The difficulty is getting the photo straight on…the top and bottom can be skewed do to the distance and/or angle from the lens…
Here’s a use case where scanning an object and ‘pulling’ features from it.
I have a Dewalt 618M on a smaller rugged CNC. The 618M is a epic router. But the big issue was the down draft exhaust. So I wanted to make a diverter for it.
As you can see in the image- The holes are not symmetrical. So I placed the part on a flat bed scanner and scanned it highest resolution that the scanner can output and saved that image as a TIFF.
Then I imported that into Fusion 360. (Note: I could not find the image that I used to ‘clone’ the hole pattern and the pocket- but the next couple images should get my point across.)
Once I had the image imported I only need two measurements. The ID and the OD. I created a sketch with those numbers then I was able to scale the image into that. Then at that point I was able to pull what I needed.
35 mins and a couple tool changes later I had theses.
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Nice job!
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