Sorry, this is not really 3d printing related. But as we have some cool folks here OS wise. I hopped you could help or point me the correct way.
As I have mentioned before my brother and I own a tiny narrow boat we are doing up.
The engine room is a nightmare. 4ft high with no top access. We are disabled (visual and flexibility basically old can’t bend and classed as blind but some vision. ) So we have difficulty measuring exact space in a room we have to crawl through. Well it’s very like Star Trek Jeffries tubes but greasy. ;)
We need to plan and mount electronics in there to support our use. (I sought advice on printing to help with this a while back and got fantastic help)
I am now starting to think having a 3d model of the engine room would make working out the layout much easier. So here is where advice is needed.
We are skint (poor for the US) so spending 1000s ain’t an option. And likely not worth it anyway.
I have heard of android apps that use photographs. And that level of accuracy is likely fine for our planning needs.
But I’m a Linux 100% user. Since the late 90s So need some way to do this that can be done on Linux and fed into FreeCAD and or Blender.
Does anyone know much about tools in this space. And what the process for doing this with photographs is?
Do you have an iPhone or any phone with lidar built in? It’s been a while but I recall it being an option for scanning, make use of tools you already have. I’m not sure what exists for Foss related apps though sorry, and afaik they’re not super accurate (dedicated scanners can get <0.01mm resolution from what I’ve seen but they’re expensive) but if your goal is layout that’d do the trick in my view. Heck, as you said, camera scanning would work, there’ll be cleanup but should be good enough to get you dimensions.
Another thought, could check with local makerspaces or the like, totally possible they may have scanners you could use, or could put you on the right track. Diy wise, kinects as mentioned, I’m not experienced with these but there are photogrammetry tools, micmac could work, there’s meshroom but that needs some compute hardware and COLMAP could also be worth looking into
Edit: Photogrammetry is decently accurate afaik, recall sitting in a tech meeting at my last job where the process engineers from the material handling department presented a poc they did with some cheap drones and cheap cameras, they did a fly over of the pier to scan ore piles and apparently were able to get fairly accurate weight estimates from the photogrammetry results, which was really cool to me.
I don’t know what your access to Xbox parts is like, but an Xbox Kinect can be used for this with a simple USB adapter that connects to a laptop.
I built one probably over 10 years ago now. Worked well enough to scan and print my head, but I had a lot of stitching to do on the file. Was still pretty blown away though. I can’t seem to find a photo of it right now, but I’ll post it if I dig it up later.
Doubt it would be super accurate for small things though.
It’s absolutely not accurate for small objects. I had a few laying around and was interested in making one but didn’t bother until a coworker asked me to print out a custom part for one of his Gundam models. I threw it together (using the better XBOne Kinect) and tried to scan the 4" tall Gundam and just got a little blob regardless of which method I used to scan (both rotating the object or rotating the Kinect around the object). I think it would definitely be more useful for something like OPs project or scanning something much larger.
I also used the 360 Kinect to build a kinetic sandbox which operates on the same principle but without the same output and that worked really well.
Have you used blender at all? It has some photogrammetry .
I’m not sure it’ll be even close to precise, but, it’s a start.
