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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.
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!
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.
You seem to have missed the fact that he *built a camera out of a scanner*
He was impressed with the resolution, and I think it looks pretty good too.
The point was to try and build it, not try to create a perfect image... I'm sure you've seen better images with a 1.5 megapixel camera, that's what they're built to do... I'm sure we can also assume that the picture on the site was shrunk down with a sort of image program to make it more web friendly
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"
Yea, and his pic that he had of his garage with the strange doors, it would be interesting to see what other stuff did.
Id say its pretty slick, in fact his whole site is (+5 interesting)
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.
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.
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!
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).
Yeah, he said he got 2k*2k images out of that camera.
Bigger thing is that because his camera is completely computerized, it can be distortion -corrected. So actually geometrical errors can be compensated for. Same goes for colors (just scan a picture of 'test pattern' and make a grid out of it).
Hmm. Now that I think of, biggest problem is 'keeping image in focus', but that seems to handle well in his pictures.
What i'm more surprised of, is that modern conan 1D / niikon D100 don't have these kind of functions. Niikon _surely_ knows distortion properties of their lenses and they already distinguish lenses with a microchip.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
...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.
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 don't have a penny, but I have a quarter...
Taken with a Fuji S1 Pro, 55mm micro-Nikkor lens and a bunch of extension tubes.
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
I don't think that's correct at all.. sort of your mentioning it, I've never heard of the plural of lego being lego and have ofter heard them referred to as legos
Technically, there is no plural of "LEGO" (yes, all caps) because LEGO is a trademark name, not a noun. There is no such thing as "a LEGO." The correct term would be "LEGO piece" or "LEGO element" or "LEGO brick." Remember, all trademarks are technically descriptive adjectives when used in product names, not nouns.
However, outside the world of official trademarks, most people I've ever heard refer to LEGO bricks as simply "Legos" or (when the context is already established) just "bricks" or "pieces". Just like people say they had "Pop-Tarts" for breakfast or "some Oreos" for dessert. Technically, there is no such thing as "a Pop-Tart" or "an Oreo" or "a can of Spam", only "Pop-Tarts toaster pastries" and "Oreo chocolate sandwich cookies" and "SPAM luncheon meat"...but in casual conversation, people usually make the trademark into a noun. Actually, this is something companies have to watch out for, in more "official" media like the press or television, because if they allow their trademark name to be used in too widespread fashion as a generic noun, it will become invalidated, and they will lose it...like Trampoline, Asprin, and many other companies' trademarks have in the past.
DennyK
Speaking as someone who worked in the printing industry doing just that sort of work for about 10 years, its is NOWHERE near that easy ;-)
=) Sorry for stepping on your toes. That was pretty badly spelled, I didn't mean 'colors', but geometrical errors. AFAIK if picture is 'in-focus', geometrical corrrection is relatively (there we go again =) easy. Of course one have to decide which mehod to use for interpolating. Lot's of fun, I bet.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
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.
Maybe this is another example of Americans destroying the English language...
Not to be inflamitory.
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
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.