Umm, wow. It's kinda tough not to be offended at this question. Here goes:Ricardo wrote:Just wondering if this scanner is a commercial venture, or will the drawings (dxf or whatever) that are used in the CNC cutter be made available for free for those in other countries to be able to get their own scanner cut out?
The first post in this thread has links to the DXF artwork, which is licensed as Open Hardware/CC-BY-SA (and it says so in the files), and the forum has at least a dozen examples of people making their own personal kits and sharing their experiences here with me encouraging them to do so.
I'm also working with a member of the forum to import 5 or 10 "official" kits to Australia for people who don't want to bother with the CNC difficulties, though it's been very difficult due to the Australian postal system being a terrible pain. By "official", I mean that they are produced by myself, can rightfully be called DIY Book Scanners, and the profits go to supporting this forum and my continued research into book scanner technology. There are also "official" kits by Mark Van Den Borre in Belgium, who services the European Union, and by Scann in Chile, who handles South America. I receive no profit from their sales whatsoever; however I trust them 100% to do the right thing, so they are "official" partners in this effort.
Open Source Hardware can be sold for profit. I do make a profit on the kits, though it is not as much as you would need to actually run a business like this. I basically use the profit to fund this forum, and to fund some new software development, and to fund my own 10-35 hours a week that I have spent on the project since 2009. Anyway, feel free to cut your own copy of the kit but please read up on Open Hardware and spend some time going through the forum, too, it will help you tremendously.