3D Modeling Project

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rpollack
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3D Modeling Project

Post by rpollack » Sat Jan 31, 2015 5:51 am

One of my brothers lives in Kampala, Uganda (my sister-in-law works for the state dept) and he has a 3D modeling/printing project. He has an M2.
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Uganda Project Details:

We recently joined a project with a local university computer science lab and health research team that is looking to remotely diagnose certain diseases that can be visually confirmed via blood sample under a standard light microscope. The obvious and pressing disease need here in Uganda is malaria, which is endemic in most of the country. Blood samples are used to confirm malaria but only if a trained technician/clinician is available to review it, which is often not possible in many remote parts of the country.

This project aims to fill that missing clinician gap by using using a custom app + smartphone camera mounted on a microscope to capture a visual of the slide and transmit to a trained tech for diagnosis remotely. In later versions, this app which is in development now may be able to detect and confirm parasites automatically.

My shop's portion of project will involve designing, printing and testing smartphone mounts that will connect the camera to the microscope easily and securely (an early proof-of-concept version is here in white. We will either be making a single design that can be modified to accommodate different phone sizes/shapes (i.e. like the screws shown in this early test version) or make different designs for different phones (i.e. Samsung, HTC, etc.)

What I am looking for is someone who can take specs--or create a concept/approach from scratch--for a mount design and build a 3D, print-friendly model, export to .stl (or m2 ready gcode) and email to us for printing, testing, and tweaking. The scope of the project, including number of phone types, etc. is still unclear so might be talking about an agreed upon hourly rate rather than project fee. The time-frame to start could be February.

Kampala is currently 8 hours ahead of US EST so much of this work and communication would be done via email.
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If you are interested, contact me (you should know how to contact me by now!) and I will connect you. MakerGear will provide filament for prototyping.
Thank you,
Rick

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ednisley
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Re: 3D Modeling Project

Post by ednisley » Sat Jan 31, 2015 3:04 pm

rpollack wrote:smartphone mounts that will connect the camera to the microscope
Thingiverse has many phone-to-microscope adapters:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:231265
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:455467
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:78071

Those were designed in OpenSCAD: changing a few constants should be much easier than re-drawing CAD models for every combination of phone and eyepiece!

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rpollack
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Re: 3D Modeling Project

Post by rpollack » Sat Jan 31, 2015 5:11 pm

Thank you, Ed

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ednisley
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Re: 3D Modeling Project

Post by ednisley » Sun Feb 01, 2015 2:58 am

Glad to help!

A Very Good Thing about OpenSCAD: the design won't get trapped inside an expensive CAD package. Anybody, anywhere, armed with a PC and Free Software can adjust the design to fit their phone & camera.

Of course, some OpenSCAD models will be easier to tweak than others, but you can use the existing source code as the basis of a better design. Some of my early OpenSCAD designs can serve as Bad Examples: "don't do it like this". [grin]

If they also need an adapter for a pocket camera, they could start with my code:
http://softsolder.com/2011/11/14/canon- ... -adapters/

Image


Let us know how it works out!

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