LadyBug: The High-Quality Motorized Microscope and 3D Scanner

Imagine that you wanted to take a picture of a very small object and you still need to zoom in as much as possible to get the smallest detail of the picture. If you have been at this stop before, then you obviously did not try taking the whole picture at once. You must have tried using a number of motors to move the object or the camera while you take a couple of pictures and then join the parts together or probably even tried doing 2D scanning a lot of times where each time you pause to take a picture, you take as many as you need to cover the object at the right resolution. All these options are good, but are not the best options that can be — they are time-consuming and can introduce subtle distortions in your image.

“Ladybug is a picture-based 3D scanner, meaning that it’s primary function is to take photographs of an object from all sides, which can then be turned into a 3D model. What’s special about it is what it takes the picture with, how it takes the pictures, and what it’s made of. First, it uses a high-powered USB microscope, which is both cheap and effective — as long as you’re just looking at a tiny part of the object! LadyBug solves this by using motors to do 3D scanning on top of 2D scanning”, writes Noselace about the miniature microscope and 3D scanner.

Made almost entirely out of Blu-Ray players and 3D printed parts, the Ladybug is a 4-axis motorized microscope and a 3D scanner for extremely small objects. The camera system is made up of a low-cost USB microscope powered by a Raspberry Pi that makes it easy to capture details less than 10 microns. The LadyBug can also be set up to perform 2D scanning as long as it fits into the platform you are working with.

Because :

“it’s very common in academia to spend years building or discovering something and then have absolutely no one to try replicate your work”,

Noselace has decided to publish a full guide in Instructables format so that those interested in building their own LadyBug microscope and 3D scanner can simply slide into the project’s official Instructables page for further instructions. Hopefully, the LadyBug would be a “serious tool for photographers, teachers, and scientists” in the nearest future.

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More information on the LadyBug can be found on its GitHub repository. Also, there is a Kickstarter campaign running and has 27 days to go.

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