super leightweight, super cheap, uncomplicated book scanner

[blisk]

Hey. I'm really interested in this setup for my first book scanner although I don't have very much experience with linux I'm computer literate enough to figure it out and I've got a year left in my electrical engineering degree. Speaking of which I'm curious how you're supplying power to the cameras AND have them hooked up to the PC. I'm assuming you spliced out the usb cable coming out of the cameras and then figured out what the cameras took as power and supplied those with the voltage, while the rest were hooked up to the PC? Any more details that a rookie like me could help to get started?

[Tim]

Speaking of which I'm curious how you're supplying power to the cameras AND have them hooked up to the PC.

I don't think any Canon camera take power from the USB port. So you just have a USB cord plugged into the camera and AC power elsewhere in the camera. Canon AC adapters either have a separate port to plug into as this camera seems to have or they take an adapter kit that sort of replaces the battery in the compartment. If you google for a particular Canon model and add "AC adapter" you can find the right model. unbelift has just been clever enough to build his own AC adapter.

If you want to control your camera from a computer the way unbelift is you need to choose one that has remote operation capabilities. You can either do that with gphoto on Linux, or by buying remote capture software. I've never tried it, but libgphoto is available for Windows, so I suppose that means you could use it there as well. In this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=381&p=3637&hilit=capture+software#p3637 Tony linked to: http://www.breezesys.com/MultiCamera/psr_index.htm as software for Windows to control cameras remotely. He mentioned $95 per camera licensing.

I decided to search for high resolution cameras that support remote operation, and the bad news is the affordable options are diminishing. Canon has removed the capability from all of their newer Powershot (cheaper) cameras, so finding a 10 megapixel or more camera that is cheap and operable remotely is quite a feat. I'll try to post the results of my search when I have it a bit more complete. For starters, gphoto's compatible list and a bit of instructions are here: http://gphoto.sourceforge.net/doc/remote/

[Turtle]

Speaking of which I'm curious how you're supplying power to the cameras AND have them hooked up to the PC.

I don't think any Canon camera take power from the USB port.

I believe it is possible. Here is a quote from the original poster of this thread: "Although the cameras have 4.3V printed near the plug for external power supply, I found out that they start working somewhere above/around 5V. "

USB supplies 5V. You should be able to run a camera that takes 4.3V based on the original poster's experience. I've powered canon powershots from the 3.3V PC supplies with scrap wires. Be careful, PC supplies may fry your camera if the polarities are reversed or the voltages are too high.

[Tim]

Oh yes, I don't think it's the voltage that's the problem for at least some cameras. I think it's just that the cameras aren't set up to take power in from the usb port.

[diybookscannermember]

unbelift,

Thank you for posting such a simple design and build. I am a Linux user and I would like to use the scripts that you provided to try and duplicate the camera portion of this setup. I noticed that the scripts you wrote were fairly proprietary to your setup, and I was wondering if you could please explain how to use the scripts and what they do in a little more detail? For example, what file names should I give these scripts? Where would I need to save these scripts on my file system? How do I run these scripts and when would these scripts need to be run and in what order?

For example, I realize that the ports for the camera's in your script might not match the ports found for my camera's, so I would need to rewrite that part of the script to match my camera's ports, but this raises the question "What other parts of these scripts would I need to rewrite in order to get them to work for my setup?"

I apologize for asking so many questions specific to your scripts. I am excited to see that something like this can work and I am looking forward to trying it out and seeing if maybe I could learn a little more about script writing in the process. I am running Ubuntu v10.04, kernel v2.6.32-24-generic.

Thank you for taking the time to post and share your information.

[digitaldysfunction]

The way the script is written, I only have to push ENTER to take the two
pictures simultaneously. In combination with the usb keyboard in the
picture, this is really convenient. (Possibility: there are seperate usb
number pads. That would take less space since I only need the ENTER key.)

unbelift,

I came across this last night surfing, you may be able to get good use of it (or a similar device)

http://www.u-hid.com/home/index.php

I don't know about linux support, though. If not, I hope at least it directs you to one that does.