The Linear Book Scanner is Open Hardware, meaning the design is publicly available for anyone to build and improve on. Many people have built prototypes, and information about each design is shown below.Open Source Book Scanner Uses a Household Vacuum To Turn the Page11/13/12 5:20pm In an effort to streamline the process of scanning hundreds of millions of titles, Google Books engineer Dany Qumsiyeh has designed a $1,500 automated scanner from sheet metal, dissected electronics, and a household vacuum. It can chew through a 1,000 page odyssey in about 90 minutes, and you're welcome to build your own since Qumsiyeh has made his Linear Book Scanner open source. With improvements and refinements made to the design and the hardware, the Linear Book Scanner has the potential to run much faster. The version demonstrated in the video is actually the prototype, and Qumsiyeh has made the plans available to the public in hopes that many will build and refine their own, and then contribute their improvements back to its original design.
[Linear Book Scanner Project via The Verge]my name is dany qumsiyeh, and i'm an engineer in san francisco linear book scanner, the open-source automatic book scanner how to turn a powerstrip into a computer-controlled lightshow my master's thesis involved developing distributed algorithms in a biologically-inspired way qrbit is a 2d spaceflight game with realistic gravity and scales i helped build a completely darkened tactile maze check out the palestine museum of natural history an adventure in desert journalismDEAL: For $25 - Add A Second Phone Number To Your Smartphone for life! Use promo code SLASHDOT25. Also, Slashdot's Facebook page has a chat bot now. Message it for stories and more. Check out the new SourceForge HTML5 internet speed test! Google Engineers Open Source Book Scanner Design c0lo writes "Engineers from Google's Books team have released the design plans for a comparatively reasonably priced (about $1500) book scanner on Google Code.
Built using a scanner, a vacuum cleaner and various other components, the Linear Book Scanner was developed by engineers during the '20 percent time' that Google allocates for personal projects. The license is highly permissive, thus it's possible the design and building costs can be improved. Adds reader leighklotz: "The Google Tech Talk Video starts with Jeff Breidenbach of the Google Books team, and moves on to Dany Qumsiyeh showing how simple his design is to build. Could it be that the Google Books team has had enough of destroying the library in order to save it? Or maybe the just want to up-stage the Internet Archive's Scanning Robot. Disclaimer: I worked with Jeff when we were at Xerox (where he did this awesome hack), but this is more awesome because it saves books."A Professor of an Ethiopian University has asked us to develop an automatic BOOKSCANNER for his and other universities in Africa. The reason for this is that they do not have the money to buy enough textbooks for the increasing number of students.
Our design goal is that every maker can build our automatic BOOKSCANNER for about 500 Euros. Find details at: www.bookscanner.deOr in other words: BUILD SOMETHING THAT MATTERS! With this BOOKSCANNER every university library in developing countries can digitize all required books and provide it to the students. First video of the project showing the first proof of concept prototype.If you like it, please hit 'LIKE' right now ... The problem which leads us to this project was the lack of enough text books in Ethiopian Universities. Ethiopia has recognized that the only way into a safe future for the country is education for the coming generations. Huge effort is already made to build universities and recrute teachers from other countries to start the process. Ethiopia has more than 100.000 new students entering the universities each year. But so far they don’t have enough text books in their libraries. It is beeing tried to make copies of them but they do not last long and the process of making them is boring and has a high failure rate (double or missing pages).
During the Maker Faire 2013 in Hannover this problem was published in a lecture from a Professor (University of Mekele, Ethiopia) and makers were asked to build an automatic BOOKSCANNER to solve this problem in Ethiopia. We thought that means to BUILD SOMETHING THAT MATTERS and work on this non-commercial project to provide plans to build the BOOKSCANNERS in Ethiopia or where else they would be needed. That was the start of the project mäqädat (amharic - ethiopian language: to copy and frisian - german coastal dialekt: ‚[so] mok wi dat’ = lets do it). We have a growing number of people working on different aspects of the bookscanner as: the mechanical design, simplification to grant an easy reproducability, electronical design, software design, writing an assembling manual and prepairing a workshop in Ethiopia to build the BOOKSCANNER there. The basic concept of our BOOKSCANNER was invented by Dany Qumsiyeh who first published his idea August 2012. We changed his design in two major aspects: The first is that Dany used a vacuum cleaner to energize the page turning mechanism with vacuum.
We invented a mechanism to turn pages reliable and gentle with pressurized air (using the Coanda effect). This has some advantages as over pressure is cheaper/ easier to generate and no pages can be damaged due to differential sticking. Secondly Dany build his bookscanner from sheet aluminium but proposed steel for further developments - you would need the right machines to precisely cut and bend this material. One major design aspect for our BOOKSCANNER was that it needs to be build without special toolings and special knowledge. The result should be a reliable machine even if only very basic tooling is available. We decided to use a main structure from aluminium profiles which can be assembled easily and sheets of acrylic for the panels. Depending on the availability this acrylic sheets can be cut with a laser cutter or by a hand saw. The material to build the Scanner will be about 500 Euros. The electronic is based on a raspberry pi computer and some additional electronic components e.g. to control the motor which moves the book.