Toucan 3D Scanner: Notes & Gotchas
See the blog post for hardware overview and safety notes, and the workflow tutorial for step-by-step scanning instructions.
Contents:
Brightness & Object Mode
- Brightness and light/dark object mode is quite critical.
- The anvil wants dark mode and the Toucan set to full brightness.
- A random bleached seashell works best in light mode with the brightness turned down.
- Once the laser is active and you can see a preview on screen, but before you start scanning, sweep around the object a bit. If parts that clearly need to be scanned have a lot of noise (blue dots vs. green), try adjusting the brightness. Ideally, when you sweep the object slowly with the Toucan in this mode, the target object’s surfaces should glow solid green.
Turntable
- Turntable works with smaller objects. Probably need a tripod for larger.
- If you rotate quickly and stop, the Toucan loses tracking during the motion. Sometimes you have to back up to get a new fix. Best to go slow, near constant motion.
- Seems like an automatic turntable would work well. I have one and will test.
Computer Control via USB
There is an Easy Scan and Table Scan section of JM Studio that do not work at all for me. They both require a calibration file be downloaded from the Toucan, but I can’t figure out how to either connect to the Toucan or download manually as none of the in-app instructions do anything but timeout or present errors. I’ll ask customer support.