Book Liberation Call to Action!
If, 10 years ago, someone from the future told me that you’d be able to download videos, music, and objects but not books I’d have called them crazy! James Vasile is changing all that with his Book Liberator.
The Book Liberator need your help liberating books! We designed a machine for scanning physical volumes. This machine is cheap and simple to build (you could do it with a hacksaw and a screwdriver), uses off-the-shelf parts, and gobbles books at a rate of 600 to 900 pages an hour. Freely licensed plans and post-processing software are avaiable!
Our next step is dead-simple kits and a refined design. I drew a 3D-printed camera mount in openscad that clamps to the machine and holds your digicam to take nice, consistent shots of your book. I need some help refining the design from somebody willing to print prototypes so we can tweak/print/test until the thing is perfect.
The mount is on thingiverse. If anybody with a MakerBot or RepRap is interested in jumping in, we’re eager to collaborate.
If anyone can help this project out, it would be great!
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4 Comments so far
Catarina Mota
Count me in. I’m sort of familiar with openSCAD and my hackerspace has a makerbot. Is there an email address we can use to contact you for more specific instructions?
Erik de Bruijn
I would think this project needs a mechanical page turner… (I know I shouldn’t just suggest it but actually design it, but I have too much on my todo list already!)
mccoyn
I was thinking it needed an auto-fire mechanism. Create a small circuit board with an accelerometer and a microcontroller and use it to send a trigger signal to the cameras when the frame stops moving.
Reece Arnott
There is another project http://www.diybookscanner.org/ (lots of variations on a theme) that I think uses a specific type of camera and some hacked firmware so that you can push one button and have both cameras take pictures (without holding your finger down). Having this autofire as mccoyn mentions shouldn’t be too hard to do but would be better if it was tied to a control circuit that also put the frame up and down if it were mounted on eg. a hinge. And if you wanted a simple page turner you could put one together such as http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/fabs_en.html
The argument from the diybookscanner crowd is that an auto-page-turning device may not be suitable for important books with fragile pages but if you had one that could be turned off it would be great.
At least one of the videos I saw for the DIY Book Scanner had a hinged lid and if you connected this up to servos you could have an automated sequence of:
1. Lift the lid
2. automatically turn the page/ Manually turn the page and click a button to unpause the mechanism
3. Close the lid
4. Take the pictures
5. Rinse and repeat
There seem to be only a couple of people working on the software to clean up the images collected in such a way so if anyone wanted to jump in it would be appreciated although it seems to have got to the ‘good enough’ stage to be of use.