Mechanical Design and Machine Design

My Contribution

For this project I build the Kinect Mount and the Remote Control.

Full Body Person 3D - Scanner

We built a 3D - Scanner which is capable of scanning a human sized object. The whole buildup consists of a rotating platform, and a Microsoft Kinect 2 which is mounted on a stand. The stand can adjust height and angle of the kinect.




Kinect Mount

The mount for the kinect needs to be able to adjust height and pointing angle of the kinect. So I designed a mount in 123D Design and printed it afterwards with a 3D Printer. The small bridge that holds the kinect itself gets lifted by a screw thread mechanism which converts the rotational movement of the motor to a linear movement. This also allows for a precise movement (maybe a little too precise since the movement is very slow), since a lot of rotations are needed to lift the kinect.

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The stepmotor and the metal rods are reused from old printer parts.


Next we build an attachement which can adjust the pointing angle of the kinect with a servo motor




Bringing all the parts together:


Rotating Platform

The rotating platform consists of three sheets of 5mm MDF cut into a gear shape with our lasercutter. We had to cut the platform in two pieces because our lasercutter is only able to cut a 60 x 30 cm surface. Afterwards the three sheets are screwed together. Next a Lazy Susan rotating tray was screwed onto the platform to allow the platform to rotate. Afterwards we attached a DC Motor XYD-16 with a gearbox. The black circle is made of Polyoxymethylen and prevents the two MDF parts from rubing against each other when someone stands on them. The gear is generated with the Gear Generator from Inkscape.



Creating the Remote Control

The remote is realized with an Arduino Uno and an Arduino shield with a stepper motor driver (A4988 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier Page). The shield is called FabScan Arduino Shield (FabScan Arduino Shield Documentation Page). This shield was created in the Fablab Aachen for a previous project (FabScan) where a stepmotor was used for a smaller 3D Scanner.

(Arduino Code File)
The servo motor and the buttons to control the movement of the Kinect Mount are connected like this. The input pins are initialized as pull-up resistors.

Image created in 123D Circuit (Webpage)


A future improvement for the remote would be to build a housing and a custom board such that the breadboard is not needed anymore and the cables are hidden.

Parts List:

  • Stepper Motor
  • DC Motor XYD-16
  • Servo Motor
  • 2 x Metal Rods
  • Thread Rod
  • Lazy Susan Rotating Tray
  • 4 x Buttons
  • Arduino Uno
  • Fabscan Shield
  • A4988 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier
  • Microsoft Kinect 2
  • MDF Sheets
  • Lots of Nuts and Bolts
  • PLA Filament


Design Files ZIP