Many of the book scanner designs in our forum feature acrylic or polycarbonate platens. These plastics are attractive because they are very easy to work with, and do not shatter like glass. A major drawback, however, is that they tend to scratch and collect dust. Univurshul, one of our most prolific contributors in the hardware [...]
I have captured the books that were on the bookshelf and which you were probably saving for some reason Forgive me they weren’t searchable accessible or portable … This community, this project is 1 year old today. In just one year we’ve gone from the depths of a dumpster in Fargo to a worldwide collaborative [...]
Guest: Daniel Reetz, founder and steward of the DIY Book Scanner community Where: MIT Media Lab E14-240 When: Wednesday March 24, 2010 14:00-15:30 Hope to see you there.
I’m totally excited about my upcoming speaking engagement at Harvard’s Berkman Center. So excited, in fact, that I’m going to use the opportunity to announce the release of a few new, exciting projects from the forums here. It’s going to be an exciting talk and I can hardly wait to engage with people in Cambridge. [...]
This post is a bit more personal than most, I hope you don’t mind. My nephew, Ben, asked me to be his show-and-tell a few weeks ago. I finally made time to visit him today. The visit was an unqualifiedl success. I presented the DIY Book Scanner project to kindergarteners, 4th graders, and 5th graders. [...]
OK, so it’s not exactly a “beta”, but there’s a new version of Scan Tailor coming up which should fix some issues with the despeckling algorithm. Tulon has asked for a little extra help (which is to say, help of a quantity greater than zero). If you have scanned pages, please go here, download the [...]
Sorry for the late notice — again, personal issues — but I’m speaking at UND tomorrow, 4PM, Merrifield 300. I’m going to talk about the DIY Book Scanner project generally, some of our newest, most exciting developments, and furthermore, I hope to engage the audience in a longer discussion about the real issues — which [...]
Rob wrote up his dewarping algorithm on his site, The Half Baked Maker. If you’re into building things, especially brassy, Victorian computational masterpieces, you owe it to yourself to check his site out. It’s particularly awesome because it’s so patiently, methodically written up. Dewarping (well, this illustrates the line-finding mechanism):
The DIY Book Scanner community has been crazy-active lately. Seems like a new scanner build happens almost daily (though I’m sure it’s less than that). New members showing up all the time, full of interesting ideas and new approaches. Gotta love it. First and Second builds by Alumrich. Possum’s simple and awesome build (lots of [...]