With a working, mini x-ray sensor, and a bluetooth-controlled mobile x-ray source on hand, it seemed silly not to capture some 3D / rotated x-ray images of the small electronics trinkets I could get my hands on.

To do so, I put together a small stepper motor system consisting of a micro controller, a stepper motor driver, a few buttons and a nice base. The microcontroller is programmed to accept some integer number of steps, and will send commands over its serial port to the computer before each step.

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On my computer, I bridged the serial port to feed its incoming data out the virtual bluetooth port, connected to the x-ray source. Initially I had a bluetooth radio on the CT scanner itself, but, it proved too unreliable for reasons I haven't yet figured out myself.

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The results were pretty to look at, to say the least.

I have not yet written a script that preforms the radon transform on the image collections, but, if anyone is willing to take the challenge, I'd love to hear more about it!

Pololu Stepper driver:

Teensy 3.0:

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The source files for this small CT scanner are available here. It uses a standard size stepper motor.