Using old medical automatic-page-turner for bookscanner

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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NormanBuchScanner
Posts: 6
Joined: 12 Jun 2019, 11:55
Number of books owned: 6000
Country: Germany

Using old medical automatic-page-turner for bookscanner

Post by NormanBuchScanner »

Hi,

I'm studying philosophy and I wanted to be able to search through all books I needed to read, but scanning them manually is a very long and tiring process. So I came to the idea to build my own book-scanner. I've searched online for some time, and I've found the PageTurner Readable PT80169A, which is an automatic page-turner for disabled people in hospitals etc. I was able to order one off of eBay declared as defective (and therefore only about 100€), because there was no remote control to it and there was no obvious way of using it.

I've sat down for quite some time, looked at the original mechanics, tried to "hack" the remote control (with an IR-diode and a brute-forcing script that tries tens of thousands possible combinations, but it never worked. Then, I ripped out the old microcontroller and replaced it with an Arduino, two motor drivers and two light barriers, and today, finally, it works!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbCuyI71ms4

(this is an older video of how this device works, but back then, it could only scan one page after another without pause, or nothing at all, which is both not really good, or, as done in this video off-screen, I had to connect cables manually which could not be automated). I restored all of the functionality today. :-)

Image

In the attachments, there's a picture of how it all is wired (I did this mostly through trial-and-error, because I never before designed anything hardware related, therefore, no circuit plans yet, sorry, and the wiring is a bit chaotic).

I also own a document scanner camera, now, I just need to set up the document scanner camera over this device somehow, and then I can start scanning books fully automated.
NormanBuchScanner
Posts: 6
Joined: 12 Jun 2019, 11:55
Number of books owned: 6000
Country: Germany

Re: Using old medical automatic-page-turner for bookscanner

Post by NormanBuchScanner »

I have decided to release the Software needed (for the Arduino and also the perl-Code controlling the whole scanning-process, managing ISBN-numbers etc.) on GitHub under the WTFPL (so anybody is free to do anything with it here).

https://github.com/NormanTUD/OpenSourcePT80169A

Maybe some of this is useful to some of you guys. Especially the latest Tesseract-version-integration I find very useful, since a. Tesseract is free software, and b. the results of the latest version are astonishing!
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