PI Scan Network Connection

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dpollard
Posts: 1
Joined: 14 Aug 2017, 23:10
Number of books owned: 0
Country: Australia

PI Scan Network Connection

Post by dpollard »

Hi Guys,
We have recently constructed our Archivist Quill with the Raspberry Pi options and results so far have been impressive.
We have around 1500 minute books to scan so I'm looking to streamline the process as much as possible.
We will have a dedicated PC to do the post scan work to turn the JPG's in to a nice looking PDF.

I was watching a video of the Archivist in action recently with Pi Scan software and the guy in the video said that it is not configured to connect to a network. I'm wondering if this has changed since that video was made? (I couldn't find a date on the video but I just may have missed it)

I have been playing with the PI for a few years and can figure most things out.

I'm happy to take any advise I get and if I can make the network connection work I'll post my results and findings here.
1500 books is a lot of SD card removal and insertions plus the wait to transfer around 1Gb per book will add a considerable amount of time to the process. It seems like it will be much easier and faster to transfer the files to a shared folder on the workstation via the network as the images are being taken rather than adding another step.

I'm wondering if this question has been asked and answered before?

I do understand why it may have been left out of the standard build for simplicity sake and to remove another potential point of failure for new users.

Thanks
David
duerig
Posts: 388
Joined: 01 Jun 2014, 17:04
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States of America

Re: PI Scan Network Connection

Post by duerig »

Hi. I'm the guy in the video. So here is some general advice:

If you have a dedicated Windows PC, then you might want to try using TwoCamControl to directly control the cameras with the PC and download the images onto a folder in the PC itself without using Pi Scan as an intermediary. If this works out for you, you will still be using the cameras, AC adapters, etc. You just won't need the Pi because you plug the cables directly into the PC.

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3082

Pi Scan itself was meant to be a standalone 'appliance'. Which is why I didn't want to require a network. If you do want to connect it to a network and have command line Linux expertise, you can do so. Here are things to be aware of:

(1) As an 'appliance', it boots up with a readonly filesystem and any changes you make to the filesystem are really just cached in memory and never saved to disk. This is done to prevent unexpected reboots from corrupting the system. In order to make permanent changes, you will need to remount the filesystem in readonly mode and change files in their original locations to avoid the overlay filesystem. Then you will need to safely shutdown the system.

(2) The default username/password on the system is 'pi' and 'raspberry' just like a stock Raspbian image. And there is no 'SSH' file on /boot so you can't ssh to it. Both of these would need to be fixed.

(3) Once you have this connecting to the network, you will want an efficient way to get the images off. I'm not sure what you had in mind here. In the Pi Scan Python scripts, there is essentially one location where it comes up with a path/file to save images to. So maybe you would change that one line to redirect it to an NFS mount? Or maybe you would have some sort of background script triggered that automatically copies files off? Something else? I'm happy to advise you on how to accomplish this once you've decided what route you want to go here.

Just let me know here or via email what you want to do and I am happy to give details. If TwoCamControl works for you, this sounds like it might be the easiest and most direct path forward for you. But if you still want to retain Pi Scan as the controller, it should be possible to do what you want and I'm happy to point you in the right direction.

-Jonathon Duerig
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