Scanners for loose papers have become so commonplace that almost every printer includes one, but book scanners have remained frustratingly rare for non-librarians and archivists. [Brad Mattson] had some books to scan, but couldn’t find an affordable scanner that met his needs, so he took the obvious hacker solution and built his own.
The scanning process starts when a conveyor belt removes a book from a stack and drops it onto the scanner’s bed. Prods mounted on a rail beneath the bed straighten the book and move it into position for the overhead camera to take a picture of the cover. Next, an arm with a pneumatic gripper opens the cover, and a metal bar comes down to hold it in place.
The page-turning mechanism uses two fans: one fan blows from the side of the book to ruffle the pages and separate them, while the other is mounted on a swiveling arm. This fan blows away from the page, providing a gentle suction that holds the page to the arm as it turns the page over. Finally, a glass plate descends over the book to hold the pages flat, the camera takes a picture, the glass plate retracts, and the scanner moves on to the next page.
It is hard to imagine, but have a look at the video in the post if you really want to see it in action.
All of the hardware, except for the camera, is controlled by an Arduino Giga using a CNC shield; the camera is directly under the control of a host computer. The host computer checks each photo to make sure it’s not scanning a previously-scanned page, and if it finds that it’s scanned the same page three times in a row, it assumes that the book is finished. In this case, it instructs the Arduino to close the book, takes a picture of the back cover, and moves on to the next book. The design and software for the scanner don’t seem to be available yet, but [Brad] plans to give a more detailed video sometime in the future.
We’ve seen a couple of book scanners here in the past. Some, of course, are more useful than others.
Thanks to [Stu Smith] for the tip!
This articles is written by : Fady Askharoun Samy Askharoun
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