As I have familiarized myself with the CR-Scan Ferret for a few days and checked how the NIR hardware actually worked on it in my last post compared to the Otter, I think I have a pretty good understanding what is required to make the most out of the scanner.

I had previously performed a very challenging scan with the CR-Scan Otter combined with my SMMT system (Small Modular Marker Tower), a scan of a 1.9 mm drill bit with far higher detail than I had thought was possible with the Otter, I figured I could give my best try to scan the same 1.9 mm drill bit with the CR-Scan Ferret and see what the result would be if I tried my very best to get as high quality scan as possible with this entry level scanner.

The software states that in Small Mode for the Ferret, the recommended minimum object size is 150x150x150 mm, which equals to an object volume of 3375 cm^3.
The product page of the Ferret online states minimum size object of 50x50x50 mm, which equals to 125 cm^3.

Now if I calculate the approximate volume of the 1.9 mm drill bit I get π*1.9^2*36.5 mm, which equals to a volume of just 0.1035 cm^3. That is 32608 times smaller volume than software recommends and 1207 times smaller volume than product page says is the minimum for the scanner. This, together with the fact that the NIR laser dot spacing in Small mode is ~1-2 mm for the Ferret, as well as the drill bit being black and having a semi-reflective coating, makes this an extremely challenging scan. The large laser dot spacing also means that a lot of Frames are needed to make sure there are enough data points on the drill bit.

Four different SMMT configurations was tested until I found a good setup for this scan with this scanner, to make it possible to track the drill bit properly. 

Next difficult thing was the NIR laser brightness in combination with IR exposure setting. Unfortunately, I did not record what Laser/IR brightness setting I used, but setting it even a little wrong gave a noisy result with all the other variables being identical, and even small noise on a tiny part like this deforms the geometry quite a lot. I also had to rotate the scanner about its own axis in steps for each 360 rotation, as well as sweeping the NIR laser dots across the drill bit in order to capture the surface this well.

After about 20 tries over 3 days of testing I finally got the result posted here.
I do believe part of the softness to it is due to the fact the drill bit could only be scanned perpendicular to its sides with this scanner, as it simply stopped registering any points if moved above or below, probably due to the laser dot size and spacing being too large to be projected properly on those small faces. In comparison the Otter could be moved up and down to get better coverage on all the small faces.

The result is not as good as with the Otter, but I am still very impressed of the performance of this budget scanner when pushed to its limits on an object this small.

Example of an extremely challenging scan with the CR-Scan Ferret with the help of a SMMT setup; a 1.9 mm drill bit.