Kevin Loney (right) and Jim Akeson with completed Argus dome frame.

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 diode laser used to excite the medium here is too weak to induce true random lasing.

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.

MF14BA_Badge-01Loney’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.

argus

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.