DIY High-Speed Book Scanner from Trash and Cheap Cameras

Step 55 Camera Support: A More General Proposal

The nice thing is that you can make almost anything into a camera arm. One idea I had is a very simple DIY "gorillapod" which is mounted to the top of a 2x4 cut at an angle like these arms.

You could also make a camera arm with a bracket much like these existing arms. I have made a little mockup in Maya. With nothing more than a board, some brackets, and a few wingnuts, you can have your own articulating arm. Actually, this system would work even better than the one I've made, and I will probably make something like it for a future book scanner.

Comments

[jradi]

Here's an idea for another type of "generalized support." It doesn't require any sort of articulation and I think it would result in very accurate and sturdy positioning of the camera. This figure only shows it from the front view, as for positioning it along the length of the platen, I would install the arms to fall in the center of the platen and just adjust the book to fall in the center - much easier than adjusting a bunch of different articulating joints simultaneously. Thoughts? I'm going to use it for my Version 1, I'll let you know how it works out.

[daniel_reetz]

It looks great, except that you cameras will have to be slightly off-parallel to not see their own reflection (that's the skew I mentioned over email). And you're dead-on that the size and shape of my two scanners could stand quite a bit of optimization. They're huge because... the parts I had are huge.