Creality Ferret 3D Scanner

 

The above photo is the third attempt at using the Creality Ferret - and the results are looking promising! While setup did not come without some of its challanges and learning curves, I believe it will be a useful tool for design going forward.

From the Creality website:


Based on the specs alone, we are to safe assume that we are limited by the .1mm accuracy, resolution and point distance of .16mm and the NIR ( near infrared) light source limiting our scanning ability for certain materials and thin objects, opposed to laser scanners, but overall a seemingly great entry level scanner.

Challanges

Getting started, I began with my phone which is a Samsung Ultra 23. To note, this version ood the scanner did not include the wifi bridge - so what's included is a 4500 mah battery boom, high speed USB C connector and the scaning unit. Connecting it to my phone was a tad frustrating, as I could not get it to remain connected. Thinking this was an issue with lint in my input, I spent a lot of time fiddling with what I thought was a hardware issue that seemly fixed itself after I happened to reboot my phone. It turns out, I will need to reboot my phone following every scan from this point forward, an annoyance for sure. 

Following a scan, it warned me that my capture was large and require much time to mesh, and I should bring my project to my PC for meshing. I seemed to quickly have found the limitations of my phone hardware.

Switching to PC, I discovered that I was not utilizing my dedicated GPU (Graphics processing unit) and that Creality Scan was using the integrated display adapter. Once I changed this, the performance was great. I was able to use my high speed USB C cable that was purchased for my Oculus 2 before I figured out an Airlink solution, allowing me some addition travel while wired.

Laptop specs:

I9 14th Gen

64GB RAM

SSD's 

4070

To play with a bit of a use case, I took my 1994 Tiger Power Rangers hand held and scanned it to design a battery cover off of it.

These pointcloud captures came out excellent. I used a few tips shared in the Facebook group and I think I am getting the technique for it.

CrealityScan has a feature to merge objects together and to achieve the best results and success of a merge, you must get overlapping surfaces for reference. I was able to do so with this scan and applying the image overlay turned out awesome 


Here we can see some distortion in what is otherwise a great looking scan. The areas seemingly affected were the bottom edge of the objects position on the table. I think rotating the part and placing up off a table would allow for a crisper scan in these areas.


Over all, the scanner is great when connected to my computer. The software felt clunky at first - but such is the case when coming into any cad type software as controls can be different. 

Looking forward to scanning other items and use them for practical designs.


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