I’ve been working on my first scanner. I decided to build the “new standard scanner”. The step by step guide to building it can be found here, but as it is fresh in my mind I want to throw out a couple of notes.

First, you only have to be pretty accurate in your measurements and cuts. For the most part the tolerance is quite large… which is good for me. 🙂

Second, this is a 90 degree scanner. That is, the book is held open at 90 degrees. Between 100 and 110 degrees is going to be a little better. The thing is that at 90 you are very close to ideal partly because your book bindings won’t get messed up from being opened too far. However, if you make it closer to 100 degrees you will get most of the same   benefit while also removing a small amount of “reflection” where the camera picks up the page across from what it’s shooting. It’s just a suggestion, but I’ll be building my second version to 100 degrees or maybe even up to  110 degrees. What would be awesome is if you angle was adjustable. And now that I think about it that might not be that hard and would be worth looking in to.

Third, do pre-drill holes before you screw them, especially on pieces of wood that you just spent a long time cutting! The screw can split your wood if you’re not careful.

references:

http://www.diybookscanner.org/

http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=333

As a super final last note I have to mention that while writing this post I went to the  main diybookscanner.org page and then clicked on forum. When I did I was  redirected to some other site… I think it  was either an “ru” or an “nu” and had ff in it somewhere, I think. I was unable to reproduce it, and nothing ever loaded on the page,  but it somehow caused me to be logged out of most sites.  I’ve never had any problems visiting the diy site before, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.