A single FPGA board from the University of Kentucky places a global-shutter USB 3.0 machine-vision camera in line with a full HDMI receiver-transmitter pair, turning any commodity HDMI projector into a structured-light source for 3D metrology. The design, called BYOP for "Bring Your Own Projector," removes the dedicated projection light engine that has kept conventional structured-light 3D scanning inside metrology-department budgets.

What hardware sits on the BYOP board?

• A global-shutter machine-vision sensor streaming full frames over USB 3.0
• An HDMI receiver and HDMI transmitter implemented on the same FPGA as the camera interface
• Firmware that routes host video through the FPGA unmodified

The board does not sit beside the projection path. It is the projection path. Video from the host computer enters the camera, passes through the FPGA, and exits to the projector unaltered. The sensor therefore captures exactly the pattern the FPGA has asked the projector to display—and at the moment the projector emits it.

That single fact eliminates the synchronization chain that defines every other structured-light rig on the market.

What instruments does the design replace?

Conventional structured-light scanners stack four pieces of timing hardware around a metrology-grade light engine:

• An external trigger box
• A frame grabber
• Custom synchronization cabling
• A dedicated projection light engine with its own DMD or ferroelectric controller board

BYOP folds trigger, capture, and pattern generation into one FPGA. The light engine disappears, replaced by any HDMI projector the user owns. The host PC remains only to collect images; it no longer schedules the illumination sequence.

Why does this matter for access?

Structured-light 3D scanning works by projecting a known pattern onto a target, imaging the deformed pattern with one or more cameras, and triangulating depth from the displacement between projected and observed pixels. Sub-pixel accuracy depends on knowing the projected pattern with tight geometric and radiometric certainty—historically the job of a calibrated metrology light engine built in small volumes.

"The reason this is important is because of access," said Dr. Daniel Lau, DataBeam Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Kentucky and a Vision Systems Design editorial advisory board member. Lau and his team frame structured-light as a procurement problem as much as an optics problem: dedicated projection light engines dominate the bill of materials, and the resulting price has confined structured-light 3D scanning to groups that can fund one.

How does multi-camera synchronization change?

The FPGA-resident HDMI pipeline gives every downstream projector and camera a common clock domain. Multiple BYOP units chain through a single HDMI distribution amplifier without distributing TTL triggers. Multi-projector, multi-camera structured-light configurations therefore become a cabling exercise instead of an FPGA design project, and the analog front end trims back: no external DAC, no DMD controller board, no fiber trigger between camera and projector.

Does it satisfy metrology-class calibration?

That is the open question. BYOP inherits the geometric and radiometric behavior of whatever projector the user attaches, and commodity DLP and LCD units ship without published warping, gamma, or color-uniformity specifications. Adopters will need to characterize their projector against the structured-light calibration they intend to run before claiming sub-pixel depth accuracy over a working volume.

The Kentucky group has not yet announced a release date or a price for the BYOP board. Whether structured-light 3D shifts from a department-capital purchase to a student-lab line item depends on that figure—and on whether camera vendors and FPGA board suppliers pick up the reference design.