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ladybug

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LADYBUG is a family of tools for motorizing a USB microscope. The easiest way to get started is using your existing 3D printer --- all you need is some duct-tape --- but you can also go super-DIY like we did at first with a couple of PS3 Blu-Ray players.

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All LadyBugs have the ability to do 2D stitching to gain an unlimited field of view:

wasp progression

Rotating in between successive 2D scans then allows imaging the entire object in this same expanded field:

wasp

The system isn't really optimized for it, but standard photogrammetry sometimes works after generating these rotary images:

scan gif process

And if stabbing dead insects isn't your cup of tea, feel free to follow living ones with realtime tracking ability:

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While the original focus of the project was on hardware (stubbornly choosing to build the thing out of blu-ray players in the first place), the core functionality that has survived and been expanded upon is motorized scanning to get huge, high quality micropanoramas out of an otherwise limited-imaging device. Field of view, at any magnification and depth of focus, becomes limitless.

LadyBug_Microscope_Kickstarter_video_original

Incidentally, that process of making sure each spot is in focus gives you 3D depth information for free without photogrammetry. In the future, I'd like to integrate this into full rotational scanning, but for now, it works surprisingly well for "2.5 D" scanning of somewhat flat objects, generating a depth map that can be 3D printed by pretending that it's a lithophane:

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A huge amount of low-hanging fruit is still out there, especially when it comes to the user interface and making the image processing and 3D modeling more automatic. For this sake, a whole-hearted effort was put into a Kickstarter, which still might be revisited at a later date. Some other links containing project information include: Hackaday (3D printer version), Instructables (Blu-Ray version), Thingiverse (Blu-Ray STL files), EasyZoom (full-sized images), SketchFab (3D models), and my youtube channel and personal website.

Currently, the project is being maintained and occasionally updated by its creator Ahron Wayne (WayneWayneHello), with valuable contributions in software from Yujie Wang (yuji3w) and hardware from Daniel Piotrowski (counterintuitive98).

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Code for operating a 4-D scanner for 2D and 3D insect (or other small object) reconstruction.

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