I’m very happy to announce the first release of the Open Source Computed Tomography (CT) scanner project. This is an early alpha release, and contains all of the source at the projects current stage, including the laser cutter design files for the machine structure, EAGLE source files, and the sample Arduino sketch.

The source is available for download here [zip], and is also available on GitHub. For potential contributors, the TODO file also includes near term project goals at a variety of skill levels, from adding end-stops and designing the official Arduino shield, to designing parallel detectors that decrease scan time, and developing a new source/detector pair for different wavelengths of interest.

I’m excited to see what folks do with this project, both now and as it matures. If you build one, want to contribute to the project, or encounter any issues, please send me a note.

In other news, the Bay Area Maker Faire is coming up in a short two months. With a good amount of progress on the Open Source CT Scanner, I’m going to switch gears for a while back to the Mark 5 Arducorder — I’d love to have the firmware and basic functionality working and demonstrable by then.

Very exciting news — the Open Source Desktop CT Scanner is featured in this month’s MAKE Magazine Homebrew Section. I’ve been a great fan of MAKE for years and presented the Science Tricorders at their first Hardware Innovation Workshop, and so it’s very exciting to see the project in this issue.

Source Files: There’s been a lot of interest in having the source files for the alpha version of the scanner, and so I’ll endeavor to have these up within a week or so. I’m in the process of collecting and packaging the source, as well as moving everything to GitHub (including TODO lists) so that it’s much easier for folks to contribute.

I think that the best thing for an open source project is to bootstrap an initial community of users that can grow into a community of contributors, and so I’d like to cut out a few sets of the laser cut parts to send to one or two folks who are interested in building (and ideally contributing) to the project. If you’re interested, please send along a note with your background and how you’d like to contribute, to peter at tricorderproject dot org.

thanks!