Has anyone successfullly completed Railman's build and got the camera software working? (last active 2014)

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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Montana
Posts: 4
Joined: 25 Apr 2022, 10:26
E-book readers owned: nook
Number of books owned: 254
Country: USA

Has anyone successfullly completed Railman's build and got the camera software working? (last active 2014)

Post by Montana »

I wanted to throw this out there in case anyone has worked on it or successfully completed his build. Sadly he was last active in 2014 and no longer visits the forum that i know of.

I'm putting together a copy of his, but I'm running into some issues in its construction based on his attached BOM.

Reference Build Thread:
https://diybookscanner.org/forum/viewto ... 6499#p6499
dpc
Posts: 379
Joined: 01 Apr 2011, 18:05
Number of books owned: 0
Location: Issaquah, WA

Re: Has anyone successfullly completed Railman's build and got the camera software working? (last active 2014)

Post by dpc »

It's unfortunate there aren't images of book pages acquired with this scanner. From the last photo of the display on the back of one of the cameras, I can see lots of reflections from the frame on the platen glass. The light is producing a strong hotspot on the upper right corner of the platen glass, and from the position of those lights on the scanner, I wouldn't be surprised if you won't see a direct reflection of the light source in captured images. Those lights need to be located much higher on the scanner frame to prevent this. You might want to keep this in mind before you start hacksawing aluminum.

Is the camera software CHDK? You should be able to get help with that pretty easily if you're running into trouble. I played around with it briefly with a Canon ELPH 160 a few years ago and don't recall running into problems getting a remote switch to trigger the shutter.
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