FaceCube: Copy Real Life with a Kinect and 3D Printer (Q43491)

This project is documented at my blog http://eclecti.cc/hardware/facecube-copy-real-life-with-a-kinect-and-3d-printer , but I will summarize it here. This project is a tangent off of something cool I've been hacking on in small pieces over the last few months. I probably would not have gone down this tangent had it not been for the recent publication of Fabricate Yourself. Nothing inspires me more than when someone does something cool and then releases only a description and pictures of it. Thus, I've written FaceCube, my own open source take on automatic creation of solid models of real life objects using the libfreenect python wrapper, pygame, NumPy, MeshLab, and OpenSCAD. The real magic comes from when you take advantage of all that OpenSCAD has to offer. Make a copy of yourself frozen in carbonite, put your face on a gear, or make paper weights shaped like your foot. This is also where the name FaceCube comes from. My original goal going into this, I think at my roommate’s suggestion, was to create ice cube trays in the shapes of people’s faces. This can be done very easily in OpenSCAD, involving just subtracting the face object from a cube.