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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"
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?
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).
...are what make the Internet great. Man, I love reading this sort of thing. Makes me wish I were crazy...
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