seltzered's build thread - portable scanner "inkspin"

[seltzered]

wow, can't believe it's been so long.
Some small progress notes:

1) Platen is finally assembled, used acrylic instead of aluminum to serve as the v-shaped braces. Also using photo frames instead of building one from scratch. Returned the lexan for now too, and using glass.

2) While the basic components needed for this project seem easy (platen, base, cabinet slides, cameras), I've spent most of my time trying to look for pieces to connect all of the above together. First was finding a good way to mount the rail slides to the base. I managed to find some metal joint pieces at the habitat restore that suffice, but if I had to do this again, Lowe's carries a (sidemount? undermount?) cabinet slide that comes with an upright metal mount. I would've purchased that and welded/glued the slide to it's mount.

3) Ran into issues where my original measurements didn't account for how many inches the metal cabinet slide mount would take up.

4) I am sandwiching the cabinet slide mount, aluminum L bracket, and cabinet slide together for a simple design. The L bracket is for camera / light mounting. I'm hoping this'll be a compact yet complete solution, addressing all the sub-systems I didn't see information about in nalfonso's build. One thing when taking this approach is that you have to purchase L brackets wide enough to go a bit more than half the width of the L bracket. Hopefully there won't be too much stress or vibrations on the camera, we'll see.


Overall, while I like how this project is engaging me to build something, I can see the appeal of just buying one of the flatbed book scanners mentioned here, and just holding the scanner upside down/moving it (to avoid the ergonomic pains of scanning face down) instead of spending time trying to build a camera-driven scanner. While it's half as fast, it seems much more effective for the case of just scanning old textbooks.

[Anonymous1]

Any luck with gphoto2? I'm on Ubuntu 24/7, and this functionality would make my life a lot easier...

[seltzered]

I haven't touched gphoto2 again yet, partly because I wanted to get the mechanical stuff done first. I'll start experimenting with it again in a week or so, I need to look back at reetz's links on hacking in PTP support on the Canon Cameras via CHDK

[seltzered]

Wow, it's been almost two months. I've been busy with some other things and parts have been sitting around, but I finally worked towards piecing the rest of this together a couple weeks ago. This is where I am now:





So yes, I'm following a heavily nalfonso-inspired build, using photo frames instead for my platen, but I want to make the camera/lighting all integrated / mounted along one common aluminum rail instead of trying to have separate "sub-systems". This also means that my overall build will be a little bit larger and may not pack into a suitcase, but hopefully still disassemble into a small box.

My biggest conundrum right now aside from camera mounting is lighting. how do I avoid this:


??!?

[seltzered]

Note: I'll try to post build costs / parts / instructions later, overall I've tried to keep the build I think below $300, at the end of the day using scrap parts/habitat restore/constraining requirements helped a bunch, although I still spent a fair penny at home depot.

[daniel_reetz]

Looks like the wider-than-90 platen and large size of your platen are working against your lighting solution a bit - but those are just guesses.

One thing to try is to set up the camera at or near where it will be in the end, and then move the light around with your hand to see how you can get it pointed at the page without the glare image of the lamp itself appearing. It's definitely tricky with large-area scanners. On the portrait-format scanner I built for DonnaA it ended up being ridiculously high up off the platen.

[seltzered]

Looks like the wider-than-90 platen and large size of your platen are working against your lighting solution a bit - but those are just guesses.

yeah, I was thinking the same thing last night.

One thing to try is to set up the camera at or near where it will be in the end, and then move the light around with your hand to see how you can get it pointed at the page without the glare image of the lamp itself appearing. It's definitely tricky with large-area scanners. On the portrait-format scanner I built for DonnaA it ended up being ridiculously high up off the platen.

I'll try this out. I know an alternative approach is to have two lights (which I plan to eventually have), and electronically stagger the lighting and cameras firing. Think about it this way, when firing left camera, have right light on.......when firing right camera, have left light on.

[daniel_reetz]

Yeah, I've always wanted to try that method - I'd love to see your result. I built a set of LED lights for another project that I'll probably test it out with.

Another thing to think about is putting a little shade over each camera so that the lighting doesn't brightly illuminate them in and cause them to appear as a glare image, too.

[seltzered]

figured I'd post an update 1 year later. I actually never finished my bookscanner, although it looks nearly done. I instead started to destructively scan books over the summer, along with just downloading some copies of my books. I just finished throwing away many the books I've replaced with digital copies.

Overall, I'm happy with trying to live without any physical books or CD's, although it's opening up a lot of questions on how to share / express myself at home without a bookshelf.

here's a picture just for fun: