What you can do with 5 2X4s some spare fiberboard, & misc...

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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incubescence
Posts: 3
Joined: 11 Jan 2016, 12:20
Number of books owned: 500
Country: USA

What you can do with 5 2X4s some spare fiberboard, & misc...

Post by incubescence »

First off, I'd like to say thanks to EVERYONE on this forum, from the Archivist on down. You all have given me so much in your experiences to learn from before I started my own scanner.

So now I would like to show my own scanner to you. This is something I put together with 5 2X4s, a few scraps of fiberboard, some glass and hardware, bungee cords (not yet pictured) and a repurposed shop roller (basically a board on wheels. I took the wheels off)

Total cost of the project?

Glass- $11
2x4s- $13
screws- I found these laying around in the basement, about a quarter of a box of 2.5" drywall screws and some 1.25"s too.
Angle bracket- $6
Bungee cords- again, laying around. I was going to use paracord and weights but we'll see how this goes
and the camera mount assembly hardware (made out of 3/8" threaded rod, eye hooks, nuts, washers) and 4 carriage bolts for the cradle assembly ~$38

68 bucks

so ummmm I just made a not very portable, not at all lightweight, first attempt at an Archivist-ish book scanner. it ought to be able to handle up to 12X14.5" books which should cover most of my textbooks for the duration of my college career.

You guys are probably going to get a kick out of this, my light source is going to be a 1000W metal halide that I've had kicking around from my gardening hobby, but taking pics of this last night in the metal halide I'm wondering why I'm getting a banding effect in some of my photos. Is it the metal halide? or is it too bright? I'm going to hook up the cameras and see how that goes. Oh yeah, I'm using 2 Powershot ELPH 160s (cost $140 together on ebay) with AC adapters from amazon that came to $30.

SO all told, this came to just under $250. I can't wait to try it out. I painted the imaging parts on it black after I took the pics.

I realize that cost is not necessarily the biggest factor for everyone looking to scan books. For me, it came down to cost and availability of parts. I still would like to attempt to make my own archivist, but I ran into a couple snags. The local machine shop wanted $300 to mill the wooden parts, something I just don't have right now, and I'm good enough with a router to try my hand at it myself. Also, the press-fit tubing connectors that the archivist uses are impressive, but I really wanted it before this semester started and I was a little late on the assembling of the complete parts list, and those parts are will require a little fanagling. As I was building this I was very grateful for all of the work you guys have done, and I say this with no disrespect to anyone, but to me, the greatest portability and accessibility of bookscanning equipment isn't any one product but rather the MASSIVE amount of information that is compiled here. With this, you can make a book scanner out of just about anything, wherever you are. I've seen so many creative ideas here, I think I've literally seen anything being used to scan books with. :-)

Any feedback you guys want to give or questions you want to ask, please feel free, I'll be checking in regularly.
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incubescence
Posts: 3
Joined: 11 Jan 2016, 12:20
Number of books owned: 500
Country: USA

Re: What you can do with 5 2X4s some spare fiberboard, & mis

Post by incubescence »

Ok... I'm not getting any banding with the metal halide, I'm just getting color shifts every few pages... I definitely think the metal halide is too bright

I definitely see the benefit of having a roller-based cradle. I'll be building that after I get a trigger made for the cameras, I also need something to hold the book vertically in the same position

I'm still on the fence about having movable cameras but I'm leaning toward not... I ran into some issues with the zoom button inadvertently being hit on one of them part of the way thru the scan and it buggered up my frame.

All in all I'm happy with my first run. It was cheap and dirty and I liked it. But it also let me see why my ideas might not be so great after all :)

Next I'm going to get my laser printer and zip off some templates for what parts I can upgrade now.
duerig
Posts: 388
Joined: 01 Jun 2014, 17:04
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States of America

Re: What you can do with 5 2X4s some spare fiberboard, & mis

Post by duerig »

Lighting issues: If the light source is too bright, you can change the shutter speed. The faster the shutter speed, the less light hits the camera. A cheap alternative to your metal halide lights might be a couple of clip-on lamps from Home Depot with flood light halogens. I've heard about banding happening with LED lights powered directly with AC current. But I don't have any experience with metal halide lights personally.

I like how your cradle supports work. It won't work with magazines or other super-flimsy materials. But a lot of books have cardboard covers which automatically act as a kind of support that your posts can hold up. Can you provide more detail about how you lift and lower it?

Having a fixed geometric relationship between your cameras and platen is a big win. This means you can get the camera aligned properly once and it will be perfect. If not, then a thicker book will have a slightly different alignment than a thin book. And as you go through a book, the position will change as well.

Please keep us posted on your progress.

-D
incubescence
Posts: 3
Joined: 11 Jan 2016, 12:20
Number of books owned: 500
Country: USA

Re: What you can do with 5 2X4s some spare fiberboard, & mis

Post by incubescence »

duerig wrote:Lighting issues: If the light source is too bright, you can change the shutter speed. The faster the shutter speed, the less light hits the camera. A cheap alternative to your metal halide lights might be a couple of clip-on lamps from Home Depot with flood light halogens. I've heard about banding happening with LED lights powered directly with AC current. But I don't have any experience with metal halide lights personally.
Well... the banding occurred with my cell phone. With the Elph 160 set to the fastest shutter speed I can find to set (1600), I don't get banding, but each individual picture differs in hue. Some are glaringly white, others are grey, some are pink or violet. DEFINITELY too bright I think. Even if that's not the real reason, I recommend just staying away from metal halides. Ugh. And when those 250W flood light halogens are only ten bucks at Home Depot, it only makes sense to make the investment for dedicated lighting rather than overkill and have to figure out how to get color conformity after the fact. Does YASW do anything like this? That's what I'm about to go look for now...
I like how your cradle supports work. It won't work with magazines or other super-flimsy materials. But a lot of books have cardboard covers which automatically act as a kind of support that your posts can hold up. Can you provide more detail about how you lift and lower it?
The cradle support is a piece o'crap. I ended up removing the carriage/eye bolt supports because they twisted, and provided no lateral movement capability for the fiberboard leaves, they would only adjust angle in that fixed position. Not some of my smartest thinking. lol

As for how I lift and lower it, I abandoned the idea of bungee cords. Since their force decreases as they contract, I didn't get enough travel in the elastic to not end up supporting the whole weight of the cradle by the time it was fully raised anyway. This resulted in the cradle never fully lowering as well. I'll be using weights for my next scanathon, but for this session I mounted eye bolts to the top of the 4 risers, and ran paracord through them to each of the 4 corners. I then dropped all 4 lines in front of the machine and down and off the table, knotted them all together into a loop and essentially did leg presses for 9 hours over the course of two days while standing on the other leg. This worked ****OK****. Not perfectly, or even 'very well.' I thought with the absence of triangles in the connection to the cradle that the platen would simply nose the book into position. Not really, and sometimes the point of the platen ended up pulling one of the pages down and making a crease in the gutter with it, so I had to use one hand to guide the cradle onto the platen, which decreased my efficiency greatly, especially since I'm manually triggering the cameras. My leg was KILLING me after two days, and my other knee was inventing expletives, and I'm 33 and in relatively decent shape... Sooooooo not fun. Don't do it. If you want to work out go to the gym.
Having a fixed geometric relationship between your cameras and platen is a big win. This means you can get the camera aligned properly once and it will be perfect. If not, then a thicker book will have a slightly different alignment than a thin book. And as you go through a book, the position will change as well.
Yeah, I do have one question about that. I don't see anywhere on the ELPH 160 that I can see the measurement of the zoom factor. If I don't zoom the camera at all, 3/4 of the picture is the inside of the platen, and only 1/4 of it is the book. And there doesn't seem to be a microadjustment on the zoom trigger. Sometimes it will zoom a LOT, sometimes "some" but never "just a teense". So I ended up zooming in, zooming out, zooming in, zooming out, until they were relatively equal in size and the platen glass was mostly all that was in view. How do you guys work with this? I see that the 160s were included as part of the electronics package, but chdk isn't supported for them that I know of....?

Thank you for the help, Deurig, I really do appreciate it. Maybe in another semester I'll be able to be of some use to return the favor, I'm halfway through an electrical engineering degree.
duerig
Posts: 388
Joined: 01 Jun 2014, 17:04
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States of America

Re: What you can do with 5 2X4s some spare fiberboard, & mis

Post by duerig »

Ouch. If you are going to use a treadle, figure out a way to do it while sitting down. :-)

Regarding bungee cords, you can use them as counterweights. You want to hook them to the cradle, then wind them past a pulley at the top and attach them to something else further on. This does not entirely eliminate the issue of varying force based on position. But it really helps.

For the ELPH 160's, I also use a Raspberry Pi 2 to control them. There is not an official CHDK build for them, but I have one I created for use with Pi Scan. See: http://diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtop ... =20&t=3264

-D
Kedar
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Re: What you can do with 5 2X4s some spare fiberboard, & misc...

Post by Kedar »

Lighting issues: If the light source is excessively brilliant, you can change the shade speed. The quicker the shade speed, the less light hits the camera. A modest option in contrast to your metal halide lights may be a few clasp on lights from Home Stop with flood light incandescent lamp. I've found out about banding occurring with Drove lights fueled straightforwardly with air conditioning current. However, I don't have any involvement with metal halide lights by and by. I like how your support underpins work. It won't work with magazines or other super-wobbly materials. In any case, a great deal of books have cardboard spreads which consequently go about as a sort of help that your posts can hold up. Would you be able to give more insight concerning how you lift and lower it.
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