Rapid is a student team at UBC. The group designs and maintains rapid prototyping technologies such as 3D printers. I have been a member of Rapid since first year of university. I am currently in a team of five that is working to build a 3D scanner.
Our hardware design follows some of the ideas used in our design project "The Ray". The frame is made from interlocking, laser-cut hardboard for cheap and easy manufacture. Metal rods are used to allow for fine tuning in the positioning of the cameras. A Raspberry Pi model 3 functions as the central control unit, interfacing the stepper, cameras, laser and memory-export.
When plugging in a memory-stick, a scan starts automatically. The scanner cameras take two pictures of the object (one with the line laser on and one with it off) for each position. A stepper-motor rotates the turn-table with a potential resolution of 0.2 degrees per step. The images are written directly to the memory-stick and taken to the computer for post-processing.
We have run successful image captures, but we require greater consistency of timing and camera exposure for the generated point cloud to be of a satisfactory quality. Work is therefore currently being put into converting the Python code to lower levels where we have greater control of timing and camera settings.