So I was chatting to Matt at the space on Friday about building a 3D scanner. The Ciclop 3D Scanner on Thingiverse is it the one I had in mind as a first attempt.
I was probably going to cheap out on the bearings though by using 16014 printed bearing-8mm steel balls on thingiverse.
I’ll post updates as and when they happen.
£18.50 in total for a chinesium bearing if that helps?
Would probably run +inf % better than a 3D printed bearing.
You could even take a gamble at £11.20
Those are plans B and C for the bearing. Part of it is that I’m curious to see how well a printed bearing will work - I’m not so optimistic that I want to use printed balls in it though; that really is asking for a rough ride!
I have a load of M8 threaded rod if it helps - I think there might be a good length on the storage rack in the space too.
I suggest a discussion with Alex Gibson of TVRRUG and rLab fame (notoriety? 
)
He has a sideline in the boards for Ciclop scanners and some knowledge of the streetcraft required to get them to work.
I have bought one of his Ciclop boards and also have all the bits 3d printed for a Piclop scanner. Sadly that project (build one of each, contrast compare) is stalled at present. Issues of repairing laser cutters and maching dibond have intervened. It does mean that I have a couple of bearings that I could let out on loan for a few months…
Thanks for the suggestions, and the offers of M8 threaded rod and the loan of bearings. I think I’ve got all of the parts I need now (although the ciclop board is taking a slow boat from the land of Banggood).
I’ll start with a 3D printed bearing frame (possibly with some laser / hand cut sheet material to give the balls a smoother ride top and bottom). I may well be interested in borrowing a bearing though to see if there is an impact on the quality of the scanning.
I think the laser lines I have a little wider too (12mm diameter) than the usual ones so there’s going to be a bit or tinkering to do with the models there.
Other than that it’s just a question of working out which safe place I put that stepper motor I was planning to use in, and cracking on with the printing and building.
@JulianWarren , if you’d like to post, or link to, a list of the STL files for the build we could make a start on producing the parts. It would be a good shake down test for the space printer
@stochastic_forest - thanks. As far as I can tell the stl files from https://github.com/bqlabs/ciclop/tree/master/stl should do nicely, with the following notes:
laser-holder.stl - Don’t print this the lasers I have won’t fit (I’ll make a new version).
bearing-clip.stl - We’ll need 3 of these.
laser-wireway.stl - These may need to be shortened to fit with the new laser holders.
So plenty to print even if you ignore these three for now.
Well after some adventures in learning blender hopefully this looks about right for the laser holder:
laser-holder12mm.stl (407.8 KB)
Having had a look on thingiverse it seems someone had already invented that wheel. (But at least I got some blender experience out of it, and an important reminder to look before you tweak).
As for the Camera Holder (which is a bit too big to print easily) it looks like that reminder applies…
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1613839/#files - Top and Bottom parts which can be linked with a “wood board” (or http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2058887 if we want to get fancier).
After 11 hours … the machine gave birth to this
Awesome! Thanks for running that off Matt! - I think that means almost all of it is printed now so fingers crossed it won’t be long before we can start scanning things.
Brilliant ! Now all I have to do is get it off the bed 
So I’ve started trying to put the Ciclop scanner together (after far longer than it should have taken). I’ve hit a little hiccup though as the stepper motor I was planning to use is too long!
I’m not really that up to speed on stepper motors though, so I thought I’d pick the collective knowledge pool here…
The motor needs to be a NEMA17 no more than 40mm long to fit the base. The BOM suggests a “42BYGHW609P1-X11” (which is driven by a A4988 based driver, with a 12v 1.5A supply for driving the motor).
Googling that motor’s product ID doesn’t seem to come back with much that’s useful - there’s an adafruit page which includes a datasheet, but it seems to be for a different motor.
There’s a review on this motor on amazon that says someone has used it to replace theirs, but the description says it’s only rated to 3.45v.
Essentially what I want to know is what to get to make this work… also as a side question I’m wondering if a scanner turn table really needs a 12v stepper motor / PSU?