Your Opinions For An Alternative Book Scanning System

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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grisard
Posts: 6
Joined: 11 Nov 2013, 06:46
Number of books owned: 0
Country: Europe

Re: Your Opinions For An Alternative Book Scanning System

Post by grisard »

dtic wrote: hardware steps: the book scanner must have
1. a way that prevents the book from sliding up or down in the tray during capture. A thin piece of wood/cardboard/plastic pushing the book spine from the top and bottom would work.
2. some form of easily repositionable markers on top of the platen glass for the two outer corners of the right and left pages. The markers could perhaps be small squares of brightly color peel off window stickers. Or something else that is small and easy to programmatically detect.
You could use Neodymium magnets and/or flexible magnets (plastic magnets, rubber magnets) at least for no. 2.
For no. 1 it depends on the thickness of the material of the cradle whether the magnets will stay in place firmly enough.

To mark the book corners on the (plexi)glass plate you could use on one side of the plate either an angle-shaped piece of sheet metal or flexible magnet and on the other side a Neodymium magnet to keep the angle in place. It might be better to place the marker on the underside of the plate to have it in the same plane as the scanned page.

Neodymium magnets are sold in rectangular or round shapes starting at 1mm thickness. Plastic and rubber magnets can have all kind of shapes (e.g. like the decorative magnets on your refrigerator doors). Even small Neodymium magnets are very strong. They firmly stay in place even if separated by a plexiglass or glass plate or a wooden board that is not too thick.

The energy density ("strength") of Neodymium magnets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet) is expressed in N grades (N30 to N52, the higher the figure the stronger), so for strength N grade not size is relevant. Flexible magnets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet#Composites) are compounds of plastics or rubbers with magnetic powders and come in all kind of colors. Both type of magnets are very cheap and easy to get (e.g. on ebay).
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