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Monday, July 18, 2011

DIY Low-Cost Book Scanner

DIY Low-Cost Book Scanner

With iPads and netbooks and ereaders becoming cheaper and more common, I was looking for a way to bring my paper books up to a digital format without having to buy a new copy of the book.  The goal of this project was to build a book scanning setup that was inexpensive, quick to build, compact, and relatively easy to use. This is a single-camera design, since I only have one camera, although it could easily be adapted it to a two camera setup. That means paging through the book twice, once to photograph the even pages, then a second time to photograph the odd pages.  With practice, I was able to photograph a 600 page book in about an hour.  With my custom post-processing software, the Book Image Processor, compiling the photographs into a book form is relatively easy and takes about 20 minutes.
  
Before going further, I’d like to give credit to the folks over at the DIY bookscanner community, which has some excellent (but more complex) builds for book scanners. Although I didn’t use their designs directly, seeing the various layouts definitely helped me get this design more-or-less right on the first try.  I’d also like to give credit for the folks over at the CHDK (Canon Hack Development Kit) community for excellent documentation on using their custom camera firmware and building the remote trigger.

Video Overview


Read More and See Videos...
http://www.314pies.com/projects/diy-book-scanner/

Simple and works well. I wouldn't want to do allot of books that way. But, for just a few, this could get you done, before you could finish building one of the Automated Book Scanners I've seen...

Don

DIY Low-Cost Book Scanner
DIY book scanner processes 600 pages/hour - Hack a Day
DIY Low-Cost Book Scanner
Book Image Processor
CHDK Wiki
‪DIY Book Scanner Demo II‬‏ - YouTube
‪DIY Book Scanner Demo‬‏ - YouTube

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