Slashdot Mirror
Building a Digicam from Scanner Elements
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Want a weird & wobbly digital camera, but don't want to spend over $100? Well,
Matthias Wandel, whose site is due for some /. lovin', used the guts of a cheap scanner, some camera parts, and scrap wood to build a very high quality digitcal camera. Read about progress
at this site. Oh, and he also builds things out of legos as well." I personally think that his Jenga Pistol and wasp-vacuum are pretty neat too.
> high quality digitcal camera My gawd, give the man a spellchecker, already...
Something like this is going to be next to impossible to find. and might be a photographic collectable as well?
Perfect reading for a sunday afternoon. File away as technology to remember for after the end of the world.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I tried something like this once, but instead of a scanner, I used a toaster.
Well, I had to add some parts, but I can say for sure that the pics I took were hot.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I personally prefer the wasp-sucker. It looks good, serves a purpose, and has the 'home-made' quality to it.
The marble gun seems dangerous, I can just imagine a kid understanding gun safety, yet building one of those
I DO NOT WANT TO START A DEBATE ON GUN-CONTROL
The Jenga thing however is stupid, as it makes you more likely to lose!
Your ideas intrigue me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter...
He seems to have confused high resolution and high quality. Getting a high resolution image is easy. That hard part is getting a high quality image. While the 2000x2000 pixel image size is somewhat impressive, I have seen better results with $300 1.5 megapixel cameras.
...I made a super-scanner out of a whole bunch of 9 flat bed scanners. I took the scanning mechanisms out of their cases, and lined them up in a 3x3 array. You could scan posters with that thing. Unfortunately I tried to write my own stitching algorithms and could never get them to work quite right. I used to have to apparatus displayed on a website, but I started getting a lot of emails from porn site operators wanting to know if I could build something like this the size of a bed. I wonder why....?
Anyway, kudos to this gentleman's engineering skills. Looks like a cool weekend project!
Looking at the pic [http://www.sentex.net/] that looks like no under statement. It look it is designed to act as door from star-wars.
[http://www.sentex.net/] I must say that looks like the safest prototype for a ejection seat =)
and it's actually quite useful (it's on the same page)
He mentioned that it lacked an infrared filter. I didn't see any pictures though. Can anybody guess if it's sensitive enough to take pictures of people in total darkness?
It's going fast. See http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:-aZjsTBQ3rYC: www.sentex.net/~mwandel/+&hl=en for a Google cache.
funny munging
"I opened and closed the garage door while I took the shot above. Really makes it look like there's something gone very wrong with the garage door."
Imagine this thing taking a picture of someone walking from the top down. Now that would be some trick photography.
check out the pipe organ he built.
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/organ/organ.html
Fuck me bitch. Aw yeah. fuck me. Fuck me. FUCK ME!!
Drip
Drip
Drip
There's some great stuff on that site. I especially like the wasp-sucker, and the marble machines.
I figure I'm not alone in liking this kind of stuff...
Infact, the site is already getting slower and slower... Slashdot effect...
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Does anyone think it could be possible to attach a cluster of digital scanner elements to form a Beowulf Cluster? The resulting image gathered from the cluster of scanner elements could be processed on a Beowulf Cluster of Linux machines and then be printed out on a cluster of printers. Just imagine the possibilities...
If this is his camera, how did he take the pictures in the article?
Seriously, I've often wondered whether there could be a good way of using a lens/projector to blow up the size of a negative/slide on my flatbed scanner. I've been surprised to find that my Epson GT7000 does a better job of getting details from the shadows of slides than a dedicated Canon 2700 slide scanner, but the resolution is of course much lower. Before I borrowed the slide scanner, I tried things like projecting a slide onto the glass plate and scanning that, but although the light rays are focused properly, they are travelling in the wrong direction to be picked up by the CCD. As Matthias mentioned in his article, using a ground glass screen might be an option, but a poor one.
Would it help to remove the scanner's own lens, and focus the projector somewhere below the glass plate, do you think? (I've already discovered I can improve the detail on scanned slides by tweaking the lens, so removing it completely is not difficult.) But the prism optics in the scanning bar might screw things up a bit... Hmm. Buy a decent slide scanner I think.
Chick Tourney
This guy also built his own network-booster out of an old loudspeaker. Now, that's what I call a genious.
So, would an infinite number of simple logical marble machines running for an infinite amount of time eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare in binary?
Do you realize this is from 2000 or earlier? Taking slashdot.org to a new height of old news (but the marble machines are nice)
Fellowship 9/11
I believe they have a competing product.
Didn't Wil Wheaton work there?
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I'm sure we already had this discussion recently. But it is one lego brick, two lego bricks, many lego bricks, several pieces of lego.
I copied this sig from someone else (but where did they get it from?)
the guts of a cheap scanner, some camera parts, and scrap wood to build a very high quality digitcal camera.
...you should see the web server he made with a cheap watch, some cat 3 cable, and toliet paper... oh, nevermind.... it just exploded.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
Well it is now May 5, 2002. Perhaps he purchased a new digital camera since his latest update? The text below is from his site. I think it is safe to assume this project is collecting dust.
July 2000 Update:
Well, within a year of building this contraption, I bought a digital camera anyways. My first digital camera was an Olympus D340R, bought it in June 1999. Then, in June 2000, I bought a cannon PowerShot S100 (the Digital Elph). Awesome little camera. Haven't used my scanning contraption much, although it is still capable of producing images sharper than what comes out of a 3.3 megapixel digicam.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
I can't figure out why the garage would look like that is it is being opened. I would understand why one side would like like a triangle, but both?
I must say his homemade organ tops everything else he shows on his homepage. From the sound samples he included on the page, it seems the organ actually works quite well. I once did a science project in high school on the accoustics of a violin, and found out accoustics is one fuzzy SOB. The tiniest error in craftsmanship can really ruin the sound. This guy is awesome.
If I still had the pics to prove it, I would post them somewhere.
:-)
I once had one of those old Logitech hand scanner jobs. So what I did was take the glass top off my stereo cabinet and would use the hand scanner on that to take pictures. It worked surprisingly well, actually. It was only B&W, but the pics were damn near perfect.
I got my GF at the time to take her pants off and squat over the pane of glass...
Yes, I'm being serious...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
This is actually a great idea. I think that the idea could be implemented better by building a large format camera box with a suitable large format lens. A typical USB-powered desktop scanner could then be used as the sensor replacing the film back. The real problem would be CCD sensitivity and noise, but I suspect that some really awesome high quality images could be made far surpassing the quality of a typical 3 megapixel digital camera if conditios were bright enough.
One thing the guy didn't mention (unless my eyes are going) was the specs of the scanner. If it's a low-end (say, 300 or 600 dpi) scanner, I'm curious as to whether higher-density scanners have higher-resolution CCDs. It's a terrible point-and shoot, but large-format photographers would be very ineterested in, say, an affordable 4000x4000 or even higher-resolution camera like this, twenty-second exposure times and all. It would be a terrific gadget for landscapes, architectural photos, and still-life studio work. At the current 2000x2000, of course, it's just a curiosity.
I thought the best thing about these new fangled scanners was that you could only do black and white face plants with a photocopier - now you can do it in colour at 1200dpi!
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
This guy has waaaay too much time on his hands, but that wasp-sucker actually looks useful. (It's on the same page as the Jenga pistol.) Of course, once you've spent nine hours sucking up a nest of yellowjackets, what do you do with the buggers? I mean, most of those suckers are still alive, and it's not like they can't fly right back out once the suction is turned off. I suppose you'd have to figure out some way of killing the captured bugs en masse -- spray a can of wasp poison in there, submerge the capture box, something like that.
Of course, you could always package 'em up and mail them to your worst enemy . . .
As for that marble crossbow, that thing is SCARY! Marbles travelling at 150 miles per hour can do some serious damage!
the man is a real genius
This guy at the bottom of the article about scanners notes a "streaking artifact" by a reflective spot. My guess is that it's caused by an effect called "blooming".
When the potential well of a CCD pixel is full (a photon hitting the ccd pixel creates an electron-hole pair, and the potential well at the pixel position captures the electrons and depending on the welldepth and wellsize can handle from a few tens of thousand to a few hundredthousand electrons) the electrons start "bleeding" to neighbouring pixels.
This bleeding (AFAIK) always occurs in one direction (in this case horizontal) because the potential bariers in one direction are different in size than in the other direction. In one direction a voltage difference is used, in the other direction physical "channelstops" are used, the n-type semiconducter there is replaced by p-type there and the insulator layer is thickened).
Most modern CCD chips have anti blooming (extra circuitry that gets rid of the excess electrons before they "bleed" away to neighbouring pixels), but I guess that is not needed when you know the maximum amount of light that is going to hit the CCD chip anyway (as is the case in scanners).
OOG break head with Open Source Digicam!
Kiyaaa!!!!
It's the only way to be sure.
to build a delorean from scanner elements. However, I can't do this, so you should buy me one.
Make a scanner out of a digital camera... um... yeah.
Yes, but after catching the wasps, how does one dispose of them? Wait for them to expire of natural causes? Far too time consuming. Perhaps he can build an add on to the wasp-vac that freezes them, or encases them in goo, or maybe generates an electrical charge with which to fry them. Perhaps the encasement unit can be refashioned to be disposable, and then a catapult like device can be erected to launch the entombed wasps into the neighbors yard. Maybe there is some member of the Myrmecophagidae family, like the echidna, that can be built into the unit to eat the wasps.
When I worked at CERN last summer, discovering the tunnels reminded me of NetHack; in all buildings the floors were numbered, but at some points you could descend the same staircases well below one (where they used certain letters instead). There wasn't any of that fun lock-picking: it's a scientific research facility and nothing is secret. In addition to heat pipes and fat pipes, you could see some 30kV cables going to the accelerators, and vacuum pipes (for protons etc) coming out. Then sometimes there was water leaking on top of them, it made you feel really safe. (Often the radiation safety seemed so bad that all the water there must have been heavy water. You know, the kind which weighs 2kg for every kg.)
Guess I was scared of a power outage, because at some places you had a kilometre of the shoulder-wide tunnel without any exits. Interesting how a kilometre of walking is nothing on the ground, but when the tunnel's so narrow you have to tilt sideways to get through, it feels a lot longer.
About the lock-picking - there were some 'forbidden' doors but you really didn't want to go there. That would be the way to the accelerator, or another highly radiative facility.
By the way, because of how CERN is situated, you could go from Switzerland to France via the tunnels. Which was cool because the French customs officers were being such jerks.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
...are what make the Internet great. Man, I love reading this sort of thing. Makes me wish I were crazy...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
His penny (from his Frankensteinbox)
My penny (from a Sony FD91, me holding the penny a few millimeters away from the lens)
Let's see some more penny photos out there.
This, as we all know, is the mark of a rtue geek:
"...but going through my collection of miscellaneous gears..."
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
it was canadian..
just goes to show what can be accomplished when we have snow for so long..
so yep.. this guy did have alot of free time
we slashdotted his brother's geocities page. and here I thought none of us read the damn articles...
do not read this line twice.
I know a guy who sells very-high-end digicams.
The "large-format" camera is a modular system. There is a camera body which holds everything together, a lens (you can figure that one out for yourself) and a back. The back holds the film, or whatever, at a certain spot. The lens focuses the image on the plane where the back is holding the film, and *click*, it exposes the film.
This was designed so the photographer could have a Poloroid back for instant previews, one back with 100 ASA film for slow exposures and so on. With the advent of digital systems, the large format system was a goldmine because the shutter, body and lens were already there. All that had to be developed was the back.
There were (and still are) two types of backs. One has a HUGE ccd there, and is designed for moving subjects. They use low quality CCDs (because the're so big) and they were very expensive.
The other type was much cheaper, and worked like this guy's gadget, by moving a 1 column CCD across the focal plane. One only had to match the resolution in the short axis with a CCD, and then move the CCD with a servo. It would (obviously) only work with a still scene.
-twb
Also glad I found his site and saw links to rolling ball clocks. Used to have one of those as a kid... Now I can have one on my desk annoying co-workers at 12:59:59. Yay! Lunch is over, everybody back to work (kaa-shunk-shunk-shunk!)
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson
Hey,
Just let me demonstrate my "magic black box" digital camera made out of a calculator and a coffee maker...it'll record 200 hours of video at the highest quality...and if you invest only $6 million....But just don't ask for the schematics!
i assume he didn't have a digital camera (to be so desperate to build one out of chumps of wood and a scanner) and his scanner was gone for good, so how he took the pictures to upload to his site ? :)
Cool hack, but it would be tied to the computer. Plus, the cathode lamps in scanners make the power supplies ungainly. You could buy a little webcam for much less than $100, and get much better shots from it. Awesome idea, well implemented, but not of any real use.
Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
How the heck did he take the pictures for the website?! The camera wasn't done yet....
I'm a 2000 man.
He has the same amount of time that everyone else has, but look what he does with it. Plenty of people might say, "Gee, wouldn't it be great to have a machine to suck up wasps, or shoot marbles," or whatever, and their friends would reply, "Yeah, give me another beer," and that would be the end of it. This guy's a genius. He dreams up these contraptions, and then he actually builds them. I thought the pipe organ was great. I'm not surprised he works at RIM. They're lucky to have him. Makes me want to run out and buy a BlackBerry, if I could afford one.
If the CCD he was using was so sensitive to IR, I wonder if he could have gotten anything out of it if he'd taken a picture at night. Maybe not enough light.
Waitaminit here. What I want to know is...
First, he says he doesn't have a digicam. Then he goes and trashes his scanner. So how in the world did he get the pictures of the contraption on the website???
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
"That actually doesn't work very well. wasps and bees and such don't drown very fast."
That's a general fact about insects. The water can't enter their tracheae because of the surface tension of the water. Now, if you add a bit of soap or detergent to the water, the surface tension decreases - and the little buggers drown quite nicely.
Didn't go to all those biology classes for nothing =)
See reference