A Laser Scanner That Puts the Markers on Itself

SHINING 3D's EinScan Trak combines an optical tracker with a detachable handheld laser scanner, and the specification that will matter most on a shop floor is not the scan rate. It is where the markers go.

Conventional tracker-free handheld scanning relies on retroreflective markers stuck onto the part so the scanner can work out where it is. On a large casting or a vehicle panel that is a genuine chore — applying hundreds of stickers, scanning, then removing them and hoping none stayed behind. EinScan Trak puts the markers on the scanner body instead and lets the tracker follow those, so medium-to-large objects can be scanned with nothing applied to the surface at all.

The rest of the specification is consistent with a system intended to leave the metrology room. Scanning runs at 2.63 million points per second at 0.05 mm resolution, with maximum range and wireless operating range both at 4 metres over Wi-Fi 6. Laser projection offers three modes — 19+19 crossed lines for throughput, seven parallel lines for fine detail, and a single line for deep features — which is the usual trade of speed against the ability to reach into a bore or a slot. Optics comprise two 2 MP depth cameras and a 5 MP texture camera on the scanner, with two 5 MP depth cameras on the tracker.

Practical details carry the shop-floor claim. Battery life is 5.5 hours in tracking mode and 3.5 hours handheld, with hot-swappable packs, so a shift does not end when the battery does. The system tolerates ambient light up to 110,000 lux — bright daylight — and is specified to handle reflective, black and metallic surfaces, which are the three finishes that traditionally require a matting spray and therefore an extra cleaning step and an argument with the quality department. A Hybrid Leapfrog function allows the tracker to be repositioned mid-project so a part larger than the four-metre envelope can still be captured in one dataset, and resolution can be varied within a single project, which lets a scan run coarse over a large body and fine over the features that matter.

Companion software is EXMeasure for dimensional measurement, inspection and colour-map comparison, and EXModel for mesh editing, primitive extraction, auto-surfacing and CAD export — the two halves of what the data usually gets used for, inspection against a model and reconstruction into one.