This is an amazing project - excellently well done!<p>And the BOM is a lot more reasonable than the writeup suggests, too: a Nikon D40 would've run $800 new with a lens kit, but it's over a decade old now - you'd be getting ripped off to pay more than a C-note for a NIB one today. You'd get higher resolution with a newer camera - 20-24mp vs. the 6mp of the D40 - but for this application I'm not sure how much value that'd bring.<p>One thing I'd note is that the lens, an 18-55 similar to one of mine, doesn't appear to have its zoom ring fixed in place. I'm not sure that is intentional, and if (as seems likely) the camera FOV is a term in the depth calculation, it'd be worth either fixing the zoom or reading the focal length from the images' EXIF data to use as an input to the calculation.<p>One other note - the Nikon D-series cameras also support an electronic cable release, with shutter triggering done by simply shorting a pair of pins on the connector. While the bare plugs aren't available so far as I know, there are many third-party cable releases available for just a couple of bucks, and it would be easy to cut the cable off one of them, trim it to length, and switch the shutter with a transistor. Might save effort and improve reliability over the IR method. (I do use an IR remote release with my D5300, but only in cases where the cable release presents risks, as for example long-exposure effects with a Tesla coil - I've seen it couple enough EMI into the release cable to trigger the shutter and even reboot the camera. But it's occasionally tricky to trigger the shutter via IR, so I prefer a cable release when I can use one.)<p>Again, an excellent project, and one I'm glad to see here on Hacker News!
Brilliant, though the metalness maps seem more like low-threshold specular maps (you can see metallic spot readings on the strictly dielectric material [bakelite?] on that handle).†<p>The way to correctly detect metalness would also involve checking for coloration of the reflected light (which is not present with specular dielectric materials [but may be confused with subsurface scatter coloration]).<p>Update: † Looks like he knows this, and just hasn't gotten around to implementing it yet.
OK, I love a good build story like any other geek out there, but I'm not sure what the purpose of this is? The article says to detect metals? Or capture 'textures' of fine grained surfaces?<p>Any clarifications would be welcome!