DIY Book Scanner

This post will become the canonical forum post for SpreadPi installation. For now, it's a collection of links to help people get started. Please post your experiences, advice, and links here so I can flesh this out into an awesome post suitable for anyone to install SpreadPi and get up and running.

The SpreadPi wiki on GitHub is here: https://github.com/DIYBookScanner/spreadpi/wiki -if you're on linux, it's sufficient instruction to get the image installed on the pi. The latest image should be here: http://buildbot.diybookscanner.org/nigh ... est.img.7z (updated as per Johannes' note below - 8/21/14)

You'll also need to install CHDK on your cameras. At this time, only Canon Powershot A1400 and A2200 cameras are fully supported. I use STICK to install CHDK with a bare minimum of fuss. http://zenoshrdlu.com/stick/stick.html

Drop by #diybookscanner on IRC once you have those two tasks complete (installed image on RasPi, CHDK installed on both cameras) and we'll help you finish the job.

I will be continuously updating this post with new information and developing it into a complete tutorial. Keep in mind that SpreadPi is not production ready right now and needs some development and documentation work.

We're particularly interested in your contributions in three areas:

1. Testing and bug reports (please put issues here: https://github.com/DIYBookScanner/spreadpi/issues or make detailed reports in this thread.

2. We need help with documentation. Editing the Wiki here: https://github.com/DIYBookScanner/spreadpi/wiki or helping me flesh out this post would be great.

3. We need help extending SpreadPi to support Gphoto2. This will allow us to use it with more professional cameras and DSLRs. jbaiter has posted information on the best way to do that here. If you're good at writing Python, please consider helping out with this very important effort.

Here is the installation process in a very abstract form.

1. Download and install the latest image of spreadpi.
2. Install CHDK on your two supported cameras. I use STICK to make it dead simple.
3. Connect the cameras to the Pi with USB cables.
4. Connect the Pi to your home network via Ethernet connection.
5. Boot the Pi.
6. Watch the LCD screen of the cameras. It will tell you the IP address of the Pi.

(the below steps only need to be done on the first time you connect it all together)
7. Enter that address into an SSH client. On Windows, I use PuTTY.
8. Log in to the pi with username spreads and password spreads.
9. Activate the virtualenv with this magic incantation: 10. Configure spreads with this magic incantation: 11. Follow the onscreen instructions.
12. On your chosen control device (tablet, laptop, etc) open a web browser and type the IP address of spreadpi into the address bar. On my home network that was 192.168.15.65:5000

Use Spreadpi!

Dan,

You can avoid having to ssh, virtualenv and run spreadpi configure very easily.

Just drop a text file named OWN.TXT into the root of both cameras. Give one of them the contents "odd" and the other "even".

Mark

Also, have a look at https://github.com/DIYBookScanner/spreadpi/wiki for some more detailed installation instructions that I've slowly been piecing together.

Mark

Daniel is using the Raspberry as a spreads server and his tab as a client.
Is it currently possible to use spreads directly to shoot and send the image to a spreads server? As far as I know Johannes' plan is to do it like that... and "spread web" has the mode "processor", "scanner" and "full"... anyone tried?

It's in the pipeline and working on my machine, though its pre-alpha and I'm not yet comfortable pushing it to GitHub.
I expect it to be ready for prime time until June at the latest.

Can anyone make a 'for dummies' guide on the following? I've tried using Win32DiskImager and it didn't work.

daniel_reetz wrote: 1. Download and install the latest image of spreadpi.

Also is it possible to run this program over WiFi with a RPi WiFi module?

Catapult, one trick with Win32Imager is that it expects a .img file and if you download the image from http://buildbot.diybookscanner.eu/night ... est.img.gz , it will be a .img.gz file. You need to use WinRar or some other tool to decompress it into an image file and then Win32Imager will be able to open it.

As for using it over wifi, that should work fine. It just creates a web server on whatever network it is on. So as long as you are connecting your tablet/computer to the same wifi access point, you should be able to visit and use the web interface.

Just a quick note, the URL posted is not the correct address for the latest image.

Instead it should be http://buildbot.diybookscanner.org/nigh ... est.img.7z

This is a regular disk image (which can be written 1:1 to the SD-Card) compressed with 7Zip.
Use 7Zip to extract it and then use Win32DiskImager with the resulting *img file.

link updated. Thanks.