BookScanner | 
| While in college in the late 90's, I always had the desire to have my books, papers, enzyclopedias, lookup tables and other printed information at hand (or better said - on my first Laptop, which was the Intel-Pentium-based Extensa from Texas Instruments ). I had to be very selective which books to carry with me between home and dormitory or travel, while the (Note-)book was just my ultimate preference.
This was annoying, but having built a stylus body scanner before, I thought it was a good time for a little engineering project on a book scanner. Optically seemed just right to me, since digital cameras started to become affordable. However, the Creative Labs camera I purchased in ca. 2000 was not good enough. The 640x480 resolution required extensive scan plus stiching 2D arrays of images, which worked, but was too slow for thousands of book pages to scan. This camera found many other applications, but I saw myself a step closer to digitizing books.
I went back to solve two main problems. A) optical resolution B) a scanning curved pages of a book without geometric abberation. I found the solution to the first problem by tearing apart dads 1999 Black/White Visioneer Paperport scanner, and extracting the optical sensor array along with drive circuits and motion control. To solve the second problem I designed a linear stage, synchronized to optics, and with high vertical mechanical compliance (you need to imagine a T-bar ski lift to visualize the priciple). Enough for the sensor array to follow mechanically the warpage of a typical book page with a small preload.
The setup required manual page flipping, but having optimized the ergonometry, this allowed scans at an average of 4 pages/min, and was good enough to easily readable digitize most of the book hardcopies I originally wanted to digitize (~few-10K pages ) :)
PS.: Sorry for the poor image. Dont have taken many pictures of the setup during thes original use. It was one of the reasons I ended up never using the digi-cam sensor to scan books. The pictures below show the physical setup in its last used, second config (Scanner taken off the cables, and where it could be used on cantilevers as regular scanner). This stuff is still pysically around, and maybe worth taking nicer images of all configs of this ngineering travesty on my next trip to Europe). :)
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