Step #1: Cut the wood parts
DIY: Download the design files (DXF artwork, zipped) at diybookscanner.org. The part outlines are in the file ArchivistBookScanner_M3.dxf; cut them on a CNC cutting machine or by hand using a jigsaw or router.
Step #2: Paint your parts
To reduce glare, paint every wooden component black. We recommend using Rust-Oleum Painter's Touch 2x Ultra Cover Flat Black spray paint. Flat black latex paint applied with a brush is also OK.
Attach the Base Bars to a Side Plate with furniture bolts, as pictured. Finger tighten only. Attach the second Side Plate, too. When you're confident that the base rests evenly, wrench-tighten the bolts until they're secure. DIY: Substitute framing screws to secure your wooden base bars.
Step #5: Assemble bungee attachment point
- The left side only needs an attachment point on the inside. Spin a nut onto a 40mm M8 bolt. Insert through the outside of the Left Side Plate. On the inside, secure with a flange nut, leaving ¼" between the flange nut and the wood. DIY: A 5/16"-18 bolt will work here.
- The right side needs attachment points both inside and outside. Spin a nut onto a 60mm M8 fully-threaded hex bolt until there's about ¼" between the nut and the bolt head. Insert through the inside of the Right Side Plate. Secure with a nut. Cap the bolt with a flange nut, leaving about ¼" between the flange nut and M8 nut. DIY: You can substitute a 5/16"-18 bolt or short piece of threaded rod.
Step #6: Bolt on cradle lift stop
With a 40mm M8 bolt through the outside of the Left Side Plate, attach the Cradle Lift Stop. Secure with a wing nut. Tighten the wing nut so the Cradle Lift Stop sticks firmly in place but still rotates out of the way. DIY: A 5/16"-18 bolt will work here.
Step #7: Apply felt (optional)
Apply felt to the inside relief of the Side Plates. This will provide a cushion between the Lifters and the Side Plates. Optional, but it’s gentler on your books. Highly recommended.
Step #9: Attach lift arms
- Pop the 608ZZ flange bearings into both sides of all 4 lift arms. Finger force should be enough. Otherwise, persuade them with a deadblow hammer or physics textbook. DIY: Consider using ordinary skate bearings, which are easier to find.
- Put 50mm socket caps through both bearings of a Short Arm. Add a washer to the ends of the protruding bolts. Connect the Short Arm to the Lifter and Side Plate. Secure the bolts with flange nuts — just finger-tight for now. DIY: You can substitute 5/16"-18 bolts, 2" long.
- NOTE: The Right Long Arm has an Attachment Point hole that the Left Long Arm doesn’t. Attach the Right and Left Long Arms to their respective sides.
- Insert a 50mm socket cap into the Right Long Arm Attachment Point hole (the head of the socket cap will be on the inside of the scanner). Add a washer. Spin a nut to the base. Cap with a flange nut.
- Once all the arms are in place, tighten the flange nuts with a wrench. Be careful. Only tighten until they feel firm. It's possible to overtighten and put pressure on the bearings, locking them in place.
- Beautiful! Test the lift mechanism. It should feel easy and smooth. If it’s crunchy or stiff, you’ve overtightened. Side-to-side slop means you’ve not tightened enough. (Of course, without the bungees attached, it’ll feel heavy.)
Step #12: Assemble cradle leaves
- Fit the Cradle Angles into the Cradle Leaves as pictured. The tabs on the Angles should face inside, toward each other.
- Hammer the Cradle Angles to fully seat them. You can be pretty forceful, don't worry. Works best with a deadblow hammer or frozen ham.
Step #14: Bolt front/back plates and camera braces
Take the Front Plate (or Back Plate, they're identical) and bolt on the Camera Braces with furniture bolts. Now bolt on the Back Plate. Make sure that when the bolts are loose you can adjust the position of the camera braces smoothly before you proceed. If not, sand a bit to loosen the fit. DIY: This is one place where you should try to match the kit. A 50mm, 1/4-20 or M5 furniture bolt and cross dowel will allow you to adjust this part as necessary.
- Apply electrical tape along the 2 shorter edges of both glass plates. The goal is to have the tape overlap both sides of the glass evenly, providing a surface to rest on the wood. The tape also pads the glass against abrasion from the metal brackets you'll apply soon.
- Lay the glass edges together at the beveled edge. Tape them together 5 or 6 times. This creates a flexible hinge that keeps the plates together perfectly when you lay them on the module.
Step #17: Bracket installation
- Grip the first angle bracket in place securely with your hand — a clamp could crack the glass. Screw the bracket into the wood. Start at one end of the bracket, and screw point-to-point until finished. Don’t switch sides — it's easy to make it uneven. DIY: Use the 5/8" steel angle brackets.
- While screwing in the bracket, you may feel the bracket and wood pushing apart. Unscrew, reclamp with your hand, and then rescrew again. Then tighten the screw the last bit.
- Remove the 5 or 6 strips of tape laying across the glass plates.
- Engage the Lift Lock so the cradle doesn't jump at you when attaching the bungees.
- Hook a bungee cord to the inner Attachment Point on the right side. Loop the cord under the pulley and hook it into the eyelet on the Handlebar. Do the same for the left side.
- Now you can lift your cradle, no problem.
- Drill holes to zip-tie your light fixtures. The side holes go 2½” from the edge; the middle hole is smack in the middle. Since I was using foamcore, I just set the lights on top and marked the hole locations with a marker.
- Zip-tie the 3 light fixtures in place.
Step #25: Download Spreads, configure your Pi
- Spreads is a tool that helps you streamline your book scanning workflow. It takes care of every scanning step on the software side: setting up your capturing devices, handling the capturing process, and downloading the images to your machine. (The image that runs on the Raspberry Pi computer is called SpreadPi). In time, Spreads will also support post-processing the images into a proper e-book! Any support questions for Spreads should be asked at diybookscanner.org/forum. We’re always happy to help.
- Download the disk image of SpreadPi from buildbot.diybookscanner.org. The image contains a complete Linux operating system and a complete install of Spreads, ready to run.
- NOTE: The SpreadPi image is based on Raspbian, but installing it from Git is difficult. We recommend you just download our custom image.
Step #26: Copy SpreadPi to an SD card
Follow this tutorial to copy SpreadPi to SD card 1, which goes into the Raspberry Pi: andrewmunsell.com/blog/getting-started-raspberry-pi-install-raspbian. For most situations, this is all you need to configure the Pi. For advanced users and occasional problematic setups, it is possible to SSH into the Pi and configure it manually.
Step #27: Install CHDK on the cameras
- Now that the Pi has an operating system, we need to configure our cameras. Download CHDK from chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK and read the user manual there before installing it on your cameras. (If you're using Canon cameras different than the ones specified here, be sure to check the CHDK website for compatible models.)
- Use the STICK utility to install CHDK to SD cards 2 and 3, which will go into the left and right cameras.
- Create a file called OWN.TXT on the root of each card. On the left camera, OWN.TXT should contain only the word “odd.” On the right camera, it should contain only the word “even.” Lock the locking tab on the SD cards. Put SD cards 2 and 3 into the cameras.
- With everything powered down, mount your cameras in the scanner, connect the cameras to the Pi, and connect the Pi to the network.
- Turn on the cameras first, and then turn on the Pi. The Pi takes up to 2 minutes to boot — be patient. It’s busy spinning up the Spreads server and getting an IP address from your network. Spreads will display that IP address on the screens of your cameras for you when it’s ready to begin.
Step #29: Access Spreads in your browser
Spreads has an easy-to-use web interface. Open a browser on any device that is on the same network as your scanner. If your smartphone or tablet is on your home wi-fi network, you can use it to scan. To connect to the scanner, enter the IP address that was displayed on the camera screen.
Click on New Workflow. Enter the name of the book you are scanning and click submit. After clicking Submit, you should hear and see Spreads configuring your cameras. Be sure to set the zoom level of the cameras — on the A1400IS the zoom level should be 13.
In Spreads, press the camera button to capture your first 2 pages. Turn the page and capture the next 2. Continue capturing until you’ve finished the book. If you make a mistake, you can use the Retake button on the left. If you don’t like the images, or see something wrong, you can configure the cameras on the fly with the Settings button on the right.
Step #32: Download images
When you’ve finished capturing, you can return to the home screen by clicking the green checkmark. Click the Download button to retrieve images from the web interface for post-processing.
Step #33: Post-processing
- The file you get straight from the scanner is a zip file with all the images, renamed and in order. However, it’s not yet an e-book. An e-book is — in many ways — better looking and more functional. You need “post-processing” to get there.
- We have 2 excellent free software packages — Book Scan Wizard and Scan Tailor — to clean the pages up. After that, they can be converted into the format of your choice, and read on the device of your choice.
- We also plan to integrate post-processing right into future versions of SpreadPi. For an in-depth discussion come visit our forums at diybookscanner.org.
- It’s alive! Now tune it up for better performance. The single biggest improvement is to cover all the openings with black cloth, paper, or plastic to prevent glare, but there are other possibilities. If you intend to digitize art books, for example, you should consider changing to high CRI LEDs. If you're digitizing small books, you could re-align the cameras to digitize just a small area of the platen. And if you want to have both your hands free while scanning, you can turn the whole thing around and attach a treadle to the handle, so you can use your foot to lift the book.
- Let us know how you use your DIY Book Scanner in the comments below!
It’s a great design, but for the price why not just buy the $700 ScanSnap SV600? I own one and it’s outstanding.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the SV600 is great for books that will lay flat without damaging them, but not so much for books that wont lay flat without damaging them.
The SV600 works with books that lay flat or not. I’ve scanned well over 100 books with it, and most of those books would NOT stay open. The solution is built into the software — when you scan a book, you can place one or two fingers on the left page and one or two fingers on the right page and pull to help expose as much of the two-page spread as possible. After the scan is completed, the software does two things — (1) it “flattens” the scan to remove the curve that would normally appear down the center of the spread and (2) it has a finger eraser tool (with draggable dots to change the shape and size) that does a very good job of removing the fingers in the scan. Hope this helps.
A friend of mine has one. He says he spends a lot of time in post processing, fixing skewed lines and cropping pages.
I think it depends on the book. For some books, the software does an amazing first-pass job on defining the edges, the split down the middle, and the text… and requires no additional work on my part except to view the scan and click the approve button. Other books will require me to drag a selection line to follow an edge of a page more accurately. For example, when a book is open right in the middle, the two-pages on top often have visible pages below them… about 1/8 or 1/16 inch visible. Make sense? Sometimes the color of the page is such that the software incorrectly identifies the pages beneath (that have already been scanned) and adds that little bit of visible edge to the current scan, making the entire scan slightly larger around the perimeter. Not a big deal for some books, but in many cases it can cause the text to look slightly smaller than on previous pages. This requires a redrawing of the border that defines the two-page spread.
I would estimate that I spend about 30-60 seconds fine-tuning some two-page spreads. It really comes down to how “pretty” you want the final version to look. For some books (like my woodworking books), I don’t care about perfection – I just want the basics of what the pages display. For other books, I want the final version to look as near exact as the original as possible.
The homebrew scanners typically take photographs, and I’ve found the quality of the final digital books is not up to par with the SV600’s final product. Putting in the time to clean up pages is just part of the process if you’re looking for high-quality scans that I’ve yet to see reproduced with the home-brew book scanners.
Thanks for sharing your experience. That’s interesting. So, have you had experience with camera & cradle bookscanning? You mentioned the quality isn’t as good. Is that because it’s a photgraph and not a scan? I’m looking for something I can scan my academic books with, that will faithfully reproduce the formatting of the book (i.e. illustrations, tables, charts, etc) and keep the original pagination. But I don’t want to spend a ton of time in post processing.
I’ve seen them used, but never owned one. The one I saw used two digital cameras and while the end result was decent, it didn’t come close to the results I get with the scanner. I think ultimately the quality will depend on the quality of the camera(s) and the angle at which the photos are taken.
What struck me with the camera-based machines was that the final PDF actually LOOKED like photos of a page. Not sure how to describe it, so just take your camera and shoot a photo of a page from about 12″ or so above the document. Look at the photo and maybe you’ll see what I’m talking about… there seems to always be something that gives it away as a photo. Now, I believe there are some folks who use this system and then run the photos through OCR to convert to true Word or PDF documents, but that’s an extra step that will likely require a lot of fine-tuning — every OCR application I’ve ever used has required me to make dozens or even hundreds of decisions — “is this a b or a p?” and “Is this word and or arc?” and that kind of thing.
No system is perfect, but my original comment here was that this system costs $700 and you can get the ScanSnap SV600 for less than that on certain websites. Hope this helps.
I think that main reason and point of building a DIY Book Scanner is not only the end functionality of the scanner, but the design, construction, and revision of these designs addresses the creative need for many DIYers. Also, the design of DIY book scanners that incorporate Raspberry Pi (and Arduino in other projects) expands the potential usefulness of these devices, and in many cases, sparks ideas for entirely new, diverse and unrelated projects.
Can many of the devices and projects on this and other sites (e.g., instructable.com, etc.) be obtained by just buying them? Yes. However, they’re not as easily modded or improved because they’re almost never built using open-source hardware and software.
In short, makers “make”. That’s what they do.
James, Thank You for your post. I have been planning to buy a book scanner for a long time. Do you own a ScanSnap sv600? Do you recommend it? Have you had any problems with it? Would laying a piece of of glass to hold a magazine flat help? Would a book cradle help? Thank You. Ray Mahlberg
I do own an SV600… I’m probably up to 150 books scanned now and my dad has borrowed it a few times and scanned about 30 of his own books. It continues to work great (2 years and going) and an update or two to the software had made even more improvements that have helped refine its ability to find the edge of pages and identify the middle seam, etc. A piece of glass won’t work IMO because of the reflection. This is a scanner, so it actually emits a bright light as the top hinged piece moves — you actually see the light move down the page and then back up. A book cradle would help if you could fix it to hold the two pages as flat and tight as possible. I just use two fingers — one on left and one on right and then remove the fingers with the software… it has a special finger erase tool that identifies the outline of a finger and it works surprisingly well.
A cradle would slow you down — there’s a setting that lets you make the scanner work continuously but you define the pause between scans. I set it to 3 seconds which gives me enough time to flip the page, place a finger on each side margin and pull flat. Scan, flip, scan flip… I do about 50 scans at a time and then stop and do cleanup. I save each 50 pages as its own PDF and then when the entire book is done, I use Acrobat X to combine all the PDFs into a single document.
Thank You for your post. Before I buy a SnacSnap. I am a retired machinest. I have 30 years of hobby machinist magazines that I want to scan. That way I can eliminate my library (lots of space) for ebooks (Almost no space)
Would it help to place a piece of glass to hold the magazine flat? Do you have any recommendations? Would you buy it again.
One other suggestion for you, Ray — I also own a ScanSnap ix500, and this one may suit you better. I had about three years worth of Family Handyman in a large stack. I took them (15 or so at a time) to FedEx Kinkos and paid $1.50 to have them use their guillotine machine to cut off 1/8″ spine. They simply stack the magazines and make a single cut… works great and cuts spine off between 10-15 magazines in one shot depending on the operator’s skill level.
The iX500 lets me put in about 50 pages at once and does double-sided scans. I can scan an 80 page magazine to PDF in less than 3 minutes. It’s amazing. I also turn on the PDF Search feature which makes it searchable via key words (so I can search my Dropbox for “Toilet repair” and every issue that has those words will show up).
The iX500 is less costly than the SV600 but it does require scanned sheets to be separated… won’t do books. Hope this helps.
Can size range of pages can it work with?
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your snapscan can’t do what the archivist can. I own one and it sucks.
Wow. It really looks great. If you ask me it looks professional and like from a store not a DIY. Great to hear that is working properly. Keep up the good work.
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I’m kind of wondering if a low power long dosage X-Ray couldn’t be used to read a closed book from top to bottom. In theory all light waves would have a focus region that could be manipulated as the depth of field. Might take a couple scans from top to bottom and bottom to top or one from a different angle to help [filter] the noise from the planes out of focus. Ionizing radiation isn’t subatomic so if its low enough and the detectors sensitive enough there is almost no chance of damage at the macroscopic levels. Books make idea subjects since unlike people who move long exposures would be easy.
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