galexa wrote: I had a fairly strong reading light pointing at the board angled to avoid any hotspots. I started with the board propped against the box, as shown in the demo but eventually used masking tape to hold it on the board, a little higher than the table level and so it was vertical and square to the camera. Scanning at 8MB was very slow.
Yes, the extra light was the key.
I put a task light pointing at the calibration board at a 45 degree angle. The phone and Eora were, of course, looking at the calibration board at a 90 degree angle. This ensured I could illuminate the board strongly while having
no directly reflected light visible in the phone's display.
The calibration board was propped against the product box as vertically as possible. I didn't spend much time fiddling with aligning the calibration board inside the blue rectangles, I just made sure the dots were all inside the blue rectangles.
My Eora was able to complete the 8MP calibration successfully in a single attempt.
The scans just seem to get worse and worse, however. I still feel like I bought a lemon, and it isn't even for
me! The company I work for needs to digitize new products for which we make accessories. We used to use a digitizer--a stylus mounted on an arm with an encoder at each joint. You touch the stylus to each point of interest you're trying to capture, and each point gets recorded in a 3D model.
But they mothballed it at some point, it sat in storage for a couple of years, and when they tried to set it up again the computer it had been connected to had been obsoleted and disposed of, and it was not possible to put a fresh install on a newer computer. Had someone the foresight to keep the original computer with the digitizer, it wouldn't have been a problem--but, of course, it had been someone's desktop and nobody considered at the time of upgrading the computer that it was the only one set up to work with the digitizer.
So, in the summer of 2016, the owners asked me to research 3D scanners for them (it's a small company). They had just received a quote from the manufacturer of an industrial scanner that could have done what we needed--produce a 3D scan that we could pull data points from to make our accessory the appropriate shape for each new model of machine we make our accessories for. The price tag was $19,000. Ouch.
We couldn't afford that, and what we wanted was something portable and easy to use so we could,
in theory, have one of our reps scan new models of machines on the fly. They were adamant about this. And we certainly didn't want to risk losing a $19k gadget at a trade show. Losing a $400 gadget at a trade show would merely be an inconvenience.
After doing my homework on the internet, I concluded that none of the consumer 3D scanners already available were up to the task. The three best candidates--the iSense, the Sense, and the Structure--were still little more than "nerd toys." The Eora, at a crowdfunded price similar to the three I just mentioned, looked like it might actually be useful. In November of 2016, I talked my boss into joining the Indiegogo campaign (
NONE of the goddamned searches I made about the Eora mentioned the Kickstarter campaign, I'd rather have joined that one!).
Well, we all know how that turned out. In the meantime, desperate to reduce prototyping time and costs, my boss purchased one of the scanners I mentioned above--the Sense. It's useless. Even the Eora I just receieved can produce a better scan than the Sense, and the Eora stinks. Now, my boss is considering buying another digitizer from the same manufacturer that proved entirely useless when we needed to install the old digitizer on a newer computer, because at least a digitizer is a proven solution. It's still going to cost nearly $10k, however.
I don't know if the makers of the Eora monitor this board (I think they use a system of relayed didgeridoos as their primary communications network--it would explain much), but I might just make a new topic for this rant.
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