DIY high-speed scanner
I have been walking around with this idea for quite some time, but simply lack the technical skills to make it happen—a high-speed book scanner made from stuff you’ve probably got lying around the house. Now Daniel Reetz has gone and done it, and his instructions can be found at instructables.com:
I’ve built two of these things now, and this instructable covers the best parts of both of them. You can build a book scanner using only hand tools plus a drill. I realized that not everyone is comfortable with using all the different hand tools you might need to make it. So I scanned a book on using hand tools that should answer all your questions.
So next time you don’t have to wait forever until a Tolkien estate gives you the opportunity to create your own Lord of the Rings concordance, you just scan the books yourselves . Tip: Abbyy from time to time gives older versions of its very good OCR program Finereader away with computer mags, so keep an eye out for those.
BoingBoing says the cost of these machines are about 300 USD. Atiz sells them ready-made, but then you should add at least one zero to that sum, and possibly double the result.
April 21st, 2009 at 12:49 pm
I may not be THE most hardware-proficient of people, but I may just give building one of those a shot! If only I could set it to work on scanning a book while I’m at work, I could get mt entire library scanned in… a few years…
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:56 am
You could also get it to scan one when you came home, and one at night.