on code.

This article was written for http://fablab.waag.org/

1. Introduction

At the Waag Society, and Fablab Amsterdam, together with Miguel Jimenez andKarim Amhali I have developed a 3d laser triangulation scanner.

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I have been working on a really exciting project last year, that’s in it’s final stages right now. It’s a 3d scanner based on laser triangulation ( laser what? ) for a project called “Architektoon!”. There’s sourcecode, instructions and pictures, available here, here and here.

Altough the technique has already been developed in the 1970′s, I still had to figure out a lot. The quality of your scans depends a lot on the resolution and image quality of your camera, the number of rotations, focus and proper calibration and framing. So it helps to have a trained eye for video. The biggest challenge was to build something robust enough to be transported over and over again,  and to be used by many different (non technical) users. Altough I frankly must admit we haven’t really left prototype stadium yet, we’ve had two scanners operating on our workshop recently, and even without me being present.

It’s funny how you can stay under the radar for a long time, and then somebody suddenly just puts up a short youtube clip with your name on it ( actually, it has my face in it too ) and it pops up on my first page of google already :0)

Ever since Google Appengine came out, I’ve ben wanting to try it for some of my own projects. Since I’ve been learning Python as a part of my graduation project, and I finally have some spare time on my hand, I decided to give it a try.

Whenever I code something, it’s usually something I need. This is no different: since I’ve made the transition from MacosX to Ubuntu professionally, I’ve been looking to replace fireworks, an essential part of my workflow when it comes to getting front-end work done. The slicing part of fireworks is so well tuned, that you’ll never want to return to Photoshop once you’ve mastered it. It allows you to point to each individual slice, set the filename, optimizations and colorspace options. I always keep my slice documents around as part of the project documents, and it’s been proven handy: in cases where only cosmetic changes were made to websites I’ve done (read: images), all I needed to do is import the new desings into a separate set of layers, and export all the slices again.

There’s nothing on Ubuntu that comes close: Gimp doesn’t have slicing, Inkscape is not very handy with images, and that’s about the alternatives that we have. So the first app I made on Google Appengine is just about that: slicing. Slicing images, in a similar way that Fireworks allows me to do.

It’s not even near ready, but I’d like to present it as a pretty function proof-of-concept, to be elaborated when more time arrives, maybe. And yes, I’ve used it a couple of times already

( furthermore, source code is here )