Useful Stuff

Reverse Engineering of a Keypad in FreeCAD

2016-06-10 10:18

Sound simple enough!

Unfortunately it turns out that you have to be cautious here.

You cannot simply use a camera - Especially the one on your smartphone!
A camera lens introduces distortions to the images that are very hard to remove.

I found it is better to use a good scanner or photo copy machine that scans to picture files.

There are a couple of things to note:

Use rulers
Without them it gets very hard to scale the scanned image correctly afterwards.
Make sure the rulers are right-angled
This makes the scaling much easyer and you can detect if your scanner produces distortions.
Get a good contrast
Since the keypad is mostly black on the front and in bright colors on the back, I used a black and white carton for the background.
Play around with the settings
Try to get a scan as good as possible.

I produced 600dpi color TIFs, that worked good for the next step.