Visible Light Tomography via Twitter

Tomography is the process where high energy radiation penetrates an object, then sensors on the other side capture the results. This is commonly used to produce CAT scans, but Emma Osbiston was tasked by Diamond Light Source — a facility that contains a synchrotron particle accelerator— with creating a demonstration of this technology. Instead of X-rays, or other dangerous high-energy radiation, she used much safer visible light as the beam. This meant that she could use a Raspberry Pi Camera Module as the detector rather than more specialized equipment.

The results, which can be seen on DiamondRPi’s twitter account, are external scans of a variety of objects made with this this technology. Besides just pumping out 3D scans, the Twitter handle was also used to command a robot to take one of 10 samples off of a shelf, and load it onto the turntable for scanning. The Pi Camera then acquired this light data, and Diamond’s software combined everything together in order to create 3D models of the various figures.

As of this writing, the account appears to be inactive, but does still contains a number of clips of the device in action and the robot loading small parts to be scanned.

[h/t: MagPi]