DIY Book Scanner

Other than turning on the cameras, you should not be pressing the shutter or doing anything else to change their mode. The cameras should be on with the 'No Image' screen up until you take your first preview shot (the next stage after the cameras are detected). So try turning off both cameras and th...

Hi. The website certificate did expire for a bit because I made a mistake. But it should be all fixed now.

Vice Chief is Daniel Reetz's YouTube channel where he has shop tips and such. They tend to be more generic shop related stuff than DIY book scanner stuff.

Sorry for the confusion.

For camera control, you can try adjusting the shutter speed. That is the best way to control how much light gets to the camera on these cheaper point and shoot cameras. Longer shutter speed means more light. And if there is too much light, the whole image gets washed out. However, even with ideal sh...

The first thing that I'd check is your external storage device. This is an error that is occurring as it tries to write the photograph out to it. So if there was a file system corruption or bad sectors on the device, that would be the most likely problem. Scan the thumb drive or SD card with a compu...

I was the one who did the conversion from the original Wordpress to the current static site version. If you want to do a more manual and thorough conversion in the near future, I can wait until your finished and post the result here. If it will be a longer term project for you, then let me know and ...

Sorry for not responding sooner on the other thread. When I was developing Pi Scan, there seemed to be no benefit to grayscale mode on the cameras. The images were not appreciably smaller and the delay on capture was not any quicker. So I decided not to include it. So I'd recommend changing to grays...

It looks like you are not actually running CHDK on the cameras. The 'Found gphoto cameras' is a bad sign. It means that it thinks your cameras are higher end gphoto cameras rather than CHDK cameras. So here is how you verify that your cameras are running CHDK. When you first turn on the camera, look...

Overall, the quality of a DIY Book Scanner is going to be higher than the flatbed scanners (near the gutters). Away from the gutters, the sensors of flatbed scanners will likely yield better results. But you will always have distorted or cut off text near the gutter since the page curves. DIY scanne...

Pi Scan does not yet support the Pi 4. I have purchased one and hope to be able to update Pi Scan to work with it soon, but I don't have a timeline for that right now. If you are planning on buying a Pi just to be a scanner, I would say just to get a Pi 3 since I don't expect the changes to the Pi 4...

I'd recommend that you read through the entire set of documents on the Archivist scanner here: http://diybookscanner.org/archivist/ This includes links to all the design files and descriptions of all the parts necessary. The DXF design files themselves are linked from there as well. Just go to the b...