Does anyone know how accurate these are to the raw data a CT scan produces, it looks really clean, has it been touched up any significant amount or is this actually the quality of the machines?
I've seen slightly better scans from the Lumafield machine I have access to at $DAYJOB, but only slightly better. The scans shown here are very high quality.
You don't get access to raw data, assuming you mean something like individual X-ray images. The service runs the tomography on some cluster in the cloud and you get access to the reconstruction through a web app.
Doing metrology on production parts normally means disassembling them and putting them under the microscope or X-raying them, but sometimes there are problems that only manifest when the pen is assembled and closed. There's a lot of geometry that isn't visible externally in a pen, more so in certain markers. The writing systems are very sensitive to manufacturing tolerances, and out of spec parts are perceived by users as a bad pen or marker (which we don't want). With a normal X-ray, it is very difficult to resolve internal geometry deep in the assembled pen with any degree of accuracy.
CT scans allow us to examine internal geometry non-destructively and they are relatively fast to run. The scans shown in that blog post I would guess took about 6-8 hours of scanning + 1 hour of reconstruction to generate. Once you start the machine, it's completely automated from there, so you don't need a technician or an engineer sitting at the X-ray machine (which BTW is running Windows XP or something worse) takings images of parts.
I’m a radiographer, but haven’t done CT in a long time.
These look cleaned up, as the metal artifact from dense things is minimal.
I’ve scanned things then converted the Dicom file into a format suitable for printing (I’d broken a part of a coffee grinder). These images look like the item when moves to a 3D print in format.
Side story: finding out what’s inside things is what CT is for. We used to scan the chip packets before loading them into the vending machine. We sort out the ones with prizes inside.
To answer the question about whether these are cleaned up, these scans aren't processed beyond what our software does automatically during the reconstruction. Industrial CT scanners are designed to scan a wider range of material densities than medical scanners. We use some copper filtration to scan parts with lots of dense materials, but no extra processing is required once we've reconstructed the model.
You don't get access to raw data, assuming you mean something like individual X-ray images. The service runs the tomography on some cluster in the cloud and you get access to the reconstruction through a web app.