To all three of my loyal readers, I apologize for my hiatus.  I’ve been in class all week learning how to use some software.  If you are bored enough to care about what it is, you can read below.  If not, just ignore the following and go buy yourself something fancy on amazon.

We purchased a laser scanner.  It’s pretty awesome.  We run this thing over a part and it gives us a bunch of little points in 3D space that represent what the laser saw.  Here’s an example of what the points look like from far away -

points1

If you zoom in close, you can tell that it is made of a bunch of tiny dots -

points2

One of the really neat things that we can do is use all of these dots to compare a part that we have to what is should be.  Since we have a model of this part on the computer, we can see how well they match.  Green is good, red means that the part is higher than what the model says that it should be and blue means that the part is lower.  Here’s what it looks like:

part-comparison

So what does all this mean?

It means that when I get some time, I’m definintely going to scan my face!  I’ll post some pictures when get the chance.