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alextousss / 3d_ultrasonic_scanner

An ultrasonic 3D scanner
GNU General Public License v3.0
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There *is* an existing application of 3D ultrasound #1

Open JobLeonard opened 3 years ago

JobLeonard commented 3 years ago

First of all, amazing work and great write-up too! In case you weren't aware, someone linked the article on Hacker News

Anyway, you mentioned that you were trying to figure out why this (apparently) wasn't done before and being open to other suggestions. Well, 3D ultrasounds are a thing, but they're used for a very different purpose, namely medical imaging:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_ultrasound

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5385255/

https://www.ob-ultrasound.net/brown3d.html

http://www.engineeringhalloffame.org/profile-brown.html

http://ardms.org/get-certified/Pages/SPI.aspx

Apparently Tom Brown, one of the pioneers of ultrasound imaging, already made strides into 3D ultrasound imaging in 1975!

This is the first thing I found when searching for "3D ultrasound" (on DuckDuckGo) so I'm kind of wondering how this slipped through. It's not quite the same application but it still counts, no?

Anyway, I'm not saying this to discourage you - if anything it hopefully gives some ideas for refining your approach, no?

Keep up the good work!

(also, off-topic, but please consider adding an RSS feed to your blog so I can subscribe to it)

JobLeonard commented 3 years ago

(also, the title changed because I basically discovered all of this while writing the issue - at first I was going to suggest that this wasn't done before because medical and geological ultrasound were very different applications, then I decided to double check my own hypothesis)

alextousss commented 3 years ago

The title of the Hacker News link is a bit misleading. In my article, I wrote that this was the first (of my knowledge) ultrasonic 3d scanner that works in the air.

Ultrasound imaging in the air is different than in physical materials because waves travel in different ways. Especially, one of the hardest challenge was building a scanner with transducers wider than the wavelength of the signal. In the water or in human bodies, the wavelength of ultrasonic waves is much larger than in the air. That simplifies the design.

Though, thank you for the links and the discussion!

I built my own blog engine in python (really just an 80-lines python script) so I'll have to build RSS myself. But, I can do it.

alextousss commented 3 years ago

Here it is ;-) https://www.alextoussaint.com/feed.xml

JobLeonard commented 3 years ago

Great! Needs a minor fix though. The RSS feed sends me to:

https://www.alextoussaint.com/posts/2021-04-28_How-I-built-an-ultrasonic-3d-scanner.md

That gives me a 404. The actual page is:

https://www.alextoussaint.com/2021-04-28_How-I-built-an-ultrasonic-3d-scanner.html

I guess it confuses the source markdown file for the output?

alextousss commented 3 years ago

Exactly! Plus I've added the "/posts/" which isn't necessary. Thanks for the catch! Should have checked myself ... Will change that as soon as I have time.