Homemade CAT Scan Shouldn’t Scan Cats
[Pyrotechnical] thought about buying a CAT scanner and found out they cost millions of dollars. So he decided to build one for about $200 using a salvage X-ray tube and some other miscellaneous parts. A scintillating detector provides the image for pick up with a camera phone. The control? An Arduino, what else? You can watch the video below, but due to plenty of NSFW language, you might want to put your headphones on if you don’t want to shock anyone.
Of course, you need to be careful when working with energetic X-rays. To keep away from the X-ray source, [Pyrotechnical] used a Roku remote and an IR sensor to control the device from afar. The electronics is pretty easy. You just have to rotate a turntable and trigger the camera while lighting up the X-ray tube.
The real problem is performing tomography (the T in CAT) to convert the flat pictures into a 3D representation. There’s software for that, of course, and that’s what he uses. Honestly, this reminded us of the cheap 3D scanners that use a cell phone and a turntable. If you took one of those and added the scintillator and the X-ray tube, it should work just as well.
If you decide to replicate this, please be sure you understand X-ray safety. You shouldn’t be subjecting anything alive to the beam — cat or otherwise. The “throw-together” build quality reminded us of another homemade X-ray machine we’ve seen. Surprisingly, this isn’t the first homemade CAT scanner we’ve seen.
