Good day all !
I am a complete idiot when it comes to 3dscanning and need your help. I want to scan a room that might be out of square and use the data to import into Sketchup in order to design storage cabinets that fit 100%
Any help is welcome! I was thinking of using the YLIDAR X4 360deg as an entry level scanner as I cannot afford anything fancy.
best wishes Kevin
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Hey @bespokerandr,
Welcome to the RobotShop community!
There’s quite a few things to unpack here, so lets focus on the basics and see if that helps!
No worries! I think most of us are… It is not exactly a simple thing to do without knowledge of many different parts of the process! Hopefully you’ll come out of this project with a lot more knowledge about many things.
Now I know scanning a room with a LIDAR sounds much cooler, but is there a reason why you cannot simply measure the room and then draw it in Sketchup?
Well, the X4 only scans distances while rotating on one axis, i.e.: 2D scans. Therefore, you’ll need to add one more axis of rotation (or translation) to make a 3D scan of a room.
Also, if you wish to save on costs you can also try out the X2 model, which has a short maximum range and lower accuracy.
For the 3rd axis, you could simply mount the whole sensor on a rotating bracket attached to something simple where you can control the angle easily like a stepper motor, RC servomotor or even a smart servo motor.
Since you already have to take care of one axis, you may want to save even more and take care of both rotating axis (using motors) and use a single beam LIDAR, such as these.
Some very inexpensive sensors such as RB-Pol-633 can scan up to 4 m (~13 ft) which would be enough to scan a ~20+ ft wide room from the centre! If you need a bit more range you could look into stuff like the RB-Ben-03 which has 12 m of range!
Anyway, so assuming you complete your first step in the larger project of 3D-scanning a room; i.e.: making an effective 3D scanner (not trivial and a full project on its own), you’ll still need to obtain the 3D point cloud generated and process it (to generate 3D shapes you can then use in Sketchup). You can find much information online to help get you started, such as these here, here, here and here.
So, here’s a short overview of the steps:
- Obtain some range measuring device that fits your needs (indoor/outdoor use, resolution, accuracy, scan rate, etc.)
- Make it so it can scan in 3D and return a useful 3D point cloud
- Obtain software/libraries/etc. to process said point cloud into a useful 3D object you can use
- Import said object into Sketchup.
As you can see, this is not going be simple or trivial to do and you will need much effort into making it happen. Of course, this is totally half the fun and very rewarding once it works. It should be said though that if this is your first electronics/software/robotics/mechatronics projects, it will be quite difficult so be ready for some hard times!
Good luck!
Sincerely,