Kevin Loney (right) and Jim Akeson with completed Argus dome frame.
Canadian Kevin Loney is a technician for wireless hardware manufacturer Mobiltex Data and a director at Calgary maker collective Protospace. In 2012, Loney built a tunable random laser made by vibrating ball-bearings in a solution of Rhodamine B with an off-the-shelf woofer. He was attempting to reproduce results from a paper in Physical Review Letters by physicist Claudio Conti and co-workers at Rome’s University Sapienza.
Loney’s DIY “shaken granular laser” in action. He now believes the consumer-grade laser used to excite the medium here is too weak to induce true stimulated emission.
In 2013, Loney put together an ultra-minimalist one-button handheld Helicopter videogame using an Arduino Uno, Sparkfun Protoshield, and a 16 × 2 character dot-matrix LCD display.
Loney’s standout project for 2014 (so far) is a collaboration (with Protospace co-conspirator Jim Akeson and Calgary Mini Maker Faire producer Shannon Hoover) to build a walk-in geodesic-framed photogrammetric 3D scanner called Argus. Embedded above, a two-part time lapse showing assembly of the the dome’s roof sections from rigid tubing and “stacked disk” hub connectors, followed by assembly of the complete 13′-diameter dome.
The finished build, which the team expects to premiere at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 in a little more than three weeks, is planned to include 35 Raspberry Pi single-board computers, each equipped with an on-board camera and LED lighting, arranged to face the interior of the dome. An automatic software pipeline will capture 35 images simultaneously and quickly render a fully-textured 3D model.
