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CMOS Cameras and DLP LightCrafter

Eli Welbourne
Prodigy 10 points
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: DSLR

Hello All,

I recently was gifted a DLP Lightcrafter by a friend working with Young Optics. I had expressed some interest in 3d Scanning and rapid prototyping. Also I was aware of some aspects of spectroscopy. So, he passed this on and now I am starting from nearly zero previous knowledge on the subject so excuse me if there are redundancies in my questions.

My first interest is regarding the process of 3d Scanning or structured light applications. My goal is to 3d scan objects for modelling. As I understand it, the projector on the DLP Lightcrafter flashes different frequencies of patterns and lights that are then read by a camera and fed into the chipset to then be reinterpreted into a 3d image. Is this correct?

  • What other hardware is required to do this? 
  • Is it required to have a CMOS camera? If so, is this what the HDMI port is for? 
  • Would a DSLR with a CMOS image sensor and streaming HDMI capability work as my camera? e.g. Canon Rebel T3i

    Any clarification or how to on this process would be great! 
     

 

  • 0
    TI__Genius 9935 points

    Eli,

    Welcome to the DLP & MEMS E2E forum.

    It is nice that you have received a DLP LightCrafter. I'm sure that you will find it to be a fascinating and useful tool for exploring the world of DLP.

    The DLP LightCrafter differs from an off-the-shelf consumer Pico DLP projector in quite a few ways. The LightCrafter is intended as a development platform for learning and exploring applications such as structured light for 3D measurement. The LCr allows for video input via HDMI, but allows for far more options for handling the video stream than with a standard projector, which only expects and displays video. Please see the LightCrafter User's Guide (http://www.ti.com/litv/pdf/dlpu006), as well as other documentation available from (http://www.ti.com/tool/dlplightcrafter#Technical%20Documents).

    To implement a 3D scanning and measurement application you will need an external camera with trigger (to sync frame captures with projected structured light frames from the LCr) and software running an appropriate 3D processing algorithm. Both the camera image capture and the 3D processing should run on a PC. In principle it is possible to integrate these functions on the processing board for the LightCrafter, but there are good reasons to do this on a PC to begin with.

    You will need a USB3 or FireWire camera with a trigger input. We have used cameras from The Imaging Source and PointGrey Research. The LightCrafter supports a configurable trigger (both in and out) which works with these (and possibly other) cameras.

    It is possible that the Canon T3i could be used, but we do not have experience with which to make recommendations on it. I think that you will find its capture rate to be too slow for satisfactory use, and you would have to factor in the frame capture software, and its delays.

    I hope this has been helpful. Please do not hesitate to ask further questions. Best wishes to you in your exploration of DLP technology and applications.