Archivist Quill and PiScan – Modding, Managing, Improving

Built a scanner? Started to build a scanner? Record your progress here. Doesn't need to be a whole scanner - triggers and other parts are fine. Commercial scanners are fine too.

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Ratspeed
Posts: 5
Joined: 12 Mar 2012, 06:06
Number of books owned: 100
Country: United States

Archivist Quill and PiScan – Modding, Managing, Improving

Post by Ratspeed »

Greetings! It has been approx. 4 years since I purchased my Archivist Quill, and due to life circumstance I am barely able to concentrate on using it. I thought I would make a thread for the mods that I've put to it, and talk about mods I'd like to implement which I could use some help. I have some questions below:

First, here are some of the simple modifications that made life easier.

Light Management / Dust Prevention / Storing Space

Very early on I realized I needed to prevent outside light from influencing the quality of the scans produced. Unless used in absolute darkness, reflections on the platen causes glare, and ambient light causes brightness inconsistencies.

Additionally, I realized I also needed a surface to permanently store this beast. I obviously could not let it permanently occupy my crafting workbench.

It's also a dust magnet—especially the glass platen, ironically. It's the most dust-crucial piece but attracts the most particles.

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Here was my answer. A television armoire! I was able to find it cheap enough on Craig's List and have it delivered.

This killed several birds with one stone. (Hard to tell how exactly how many what with all the screams of agony and blood.) But among the list...
  • This gave me a covered surface to block out light
  • The surface is low enough to scan while sitting.
  • The double doors extend and swivel, blocking light from the many windows I have.
  • It prevents dust from collecting while being stored.
  • It provides additional storage below.
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As you can hopefully see, even with all windows surrounding it open, the scanner is shrouded in eternal darkness. Emo scanner.

The scanner has been sitting in this armoire for three years and barely collected any dust. Ironically, the glass platen seemed to attract the most, so I think creating and placing a fabric cover to lay over the platen will greatly help.

Shroud

Before this, my first plan was to create a shroud. I still plan on making it, though at the moment it's not a high priority. If anyone shows interest I might continue, so here was my progress on that...

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I determined the area needed for shrouding was anything between the light-source and platen. I also wanted the shroud to be easily removable. But with the odd shape, and wanting to make something fitted to the frame, I didn't want to just drape a piece of cloth around it. I realized I could use the aluminium extrusions to mount snap buttons.

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These are cheap and easily obtainable at any sewing store. They can be anchored on with screws and square nuts (bought through the same store Tenrec gets their parts from.

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This was the pattern I drafted for the back and front pieces, showing where snap buttons would be placed, including the seam allowances. The front piece, if made, would need to flap back in order to see the book.


Better, Smaller Counterweights

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The large counterweight bag obstructs the view of the platen while working. I improved this by using something heavier. Much heavier. I had some lead tire strips laying around, so I measured how many I needed to achieve equilibrium, then divvied up the difference by slicing up the canvas bag provided into two small ones I hung from velcro straps under each pulley rope.

This reduced the size drastically and opened up visibility of the machine. I can now see what I'm doing under the pull-down bar. Eventually I'd like to replace these all together with tension springs connected between the arms and the feet of the machine.


Cradle Bedding


The angle of the cradle does not perfectly match that of the platen. Additionally, the cradle mid-section cannot be made into a perfect V. There will always be at least an inch-wide gap between the left and right wings, so any volumes thinner than that have a tendency to shift around. My solution to both these problems was to create a simple, fluffy bedding to place into the cradle.

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I cut some black synthetic fibre automotive flooring for bedding for the cradle. It has a robust 1/4" pile, and has a very durable 1/8" thick backing. This gives a total surface depth of 3/8" which keeps the pages very secure and flush against the glass. The added value to this is the cushioning provides better pressure tolerance when pressing books up against the platen.

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Book Placement Spacer

Another minor problem is that books tend to shift on the cradle's Y axis mid-scan-job; and though the bedding helps, shifting is inevitable, so I created a simple spacer by placing a piece of cardboard and electrical tape near the top. This will work for now until I come up with a better solution. Ideally, books need to be positioned in the middle of the bed, so an adjustable spacer would work better.

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In the next post, I'll go over some of the things I'd like to do with this that frankly are beyond me...
Ratspeed
Posts: 5
Joined: 12 Mar 2012, 06:06
Number of books owned: 100
Country: United States

Problem: All changes wipe on reboot. Re: Archivist Quill and PiScan – Modding, Managing, Improving

Post by Ratspeed »

There are plenty of changes I would like to make and experiment with on my Quill, but I can't because of a problem I'm facing.

But before I can even do this, I'm facing a problem. Every time I reboot the Raspberry Pi, all changes to it are lost. I'm not sure if this is intended by design or a problem with the SD card, but it's running Raspberian in read-only mode:

Code: Select all

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ mount | grep "ro,"
/dev/root on / type ext4 (ro,noatime,data=ordered)
tmpfs on /sys/fs/cgroup type tmpfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=755)
tmpfs on /etc/machine-id type tmpfs (ro,mode=755)
/dev/mmcblk0p1 on /boot type vfat (ro,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)
The reason why I'm not sure if it's intentional or not is because I found several forum threads dated between 2015 and 2017 that talk of an issue with Raspberry Pi 2 corrupting SD cards, causing the OS to boot in read-only mode. This problem was present even in 2017 when a friend tried making changes to the OS and discovered they were wiped on reboot. Also, I don't think it's due to an old SD card because I haven't even powered the Quill up for 4 years until yesterday.

But, read-only mode could be intentional. On PiScan's git page they mention that corruption is impossible with a simple Pi reboot. I am unsure if they are referring to just the PiScan script or the entire OS / Image. I sent an email to Tenric to ask for clarification. If it is, I need a way of undoing the read-only mode on the image, because in order for me to make any changes I need them to stick. :)

I should also mention that the OS looks in dire need of upgrading, too. There are a ton of high-priority security upgrades alone that need to be performed. The Linux kernel version is from 2017. Big ouch.

What am I looking to change?
  • Send scanned images directly from the Quill to my Ubuntu NAS server over LAN instead of the USB drive
  • Update PiScan
  • Experiment with other cameras
  • Experiment with other scanning software
iam2sam
Posts: 12
Joined: 11 Apr 2015, 07:26
Number of books owned: 0
Country: US

Re: Archivist Quill and PiScan – Modding, Managing, Improving

Post by iam2sam »

Is this mod thread intended to be continued by the OP, or is it complete? The the only real problem I have had with mine is dust accumulation. I don't have room for an additional piece of furniture, so I may have to live with it. Caveat - I've only done one (albeit sizeable) scan job - my high school yearbook from my graduation year to digitize and use for our 50th reunion. This was 5 years ago, both build and scan. I have mine in my office/library, that has only two windows with good blinds, and is not particularly well-lighted. The yearbook is made with highly calendared paper, so I would expect any potential glare problem to have shown up when scanning it. It was apparently thick enough that the standard platen arrangement worked well - I don't recall any issue in that regard.

I will consider replicating your counterweight alteration - not only is the standard arrangement awkward, but I have followed the recommendation of full water bottles for weight, and the possibility of a ruptured bottle and a leak when scanning one-of-a-kind printed material is not all that pleasant a thought. My scanner is at a suitable height to scan while seated in my computer chair. I don't recall if there were any options re height when I ordered my kit. I know I didn't mod that on my own. I seem to recall that the original designer/kit vendor was pushing some kind of camera upgrade a year or so ago. Did you make that upgrade, or are you still using the originally specified cameras?

I plan to put the scanner back into operation shortly. I have a couple thousand books, some of them quite unusual. Initially i planned to scan most of them. However, I found that many of them were available in reasonably good digitized form on Internet Archive, so I decided to not reinvent that wheel. I need to go through my inventory list and select the volumes that are unique in that sense. I sure hope I don't run into the Raspberry/SD card issue reported by the second poster...
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