Bookscanner

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Revision as of 21:00, 19 December 2013 by Pemulis (talk | contribs) (→‎Cameras)
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The DIY Book Scanner is a project of the Noisebridge Digital Archivists group. It's based on the open-source DIY Book Scanner Kit designed by Daniel Reetz.

Here's the scanner first being assembled:

Diybookscanner.jpg

The completed scanner ready to scan:

Diybookscanner1.jpg


Lighting

The original LED light was replaced with a larger LED array. To avoid glare, the array is mounted perpendicularly so the long side is parallel with the spine of the book. All of the interior surfaces of the book scanner are painted black, to avoid casting reflections on the glass.

Cameras

We use two Canon cameras connected with USB to a computer and remote-controlled with a Python script that uses the gphoto2 library. You can find the full list of cameras supported by gphoto2 here. The pictures are transferred to the computer as soon as they are taken, rather than stored on an SD card.

Trigger

The cameras are triggered by a button mounted next to the handle on the scanner. The button is connected to a circuit board from a USB keyboard, so it behaves like pressing the "enter" key on the computer.