Pseudonymous maker and cosplayer “Caelestis Cosplay” has constructed a customized doc scanner, powered by a Raspberry Pi single-board laptop (SBC) and a Raspberry Pi Digital camera Module V2 — all held collectively utilizing a wise 3D-printable body.

“The flexibility to digitize paperwork effectively holds huge significance in at present’s digital-first surroundings, serving functions starting from private archiving to decreasing paper litter and facilitating academic actions,” Caelestis explains of the mission’s potential. “Assembling this scanner your self not solely supplies a cheap various to business scanners but additionally enriches your understanding of {hardware} integration, software program improvement, and superior picture processing.”

The guts of the construct is a Raspberry Pi 4 Mannequin B single-board laptop — and whereas different fashions needs to be supported by the software program used, the 3D-printed framework that places every thing collectively would must be modified accordingly.

The Raspberry Pi board’s general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins are related to a single push-button change, a piezoelectric buzzer, and a pair of LEDs — used to set off a seize and to supply a screen-free standing readout respectively — whereas a Raspberry Pi Digital camera Module V2 handles the precise doc scanning work.

In contrast to a conventional flatbed scanner, which makes use of a transferring scanning head, Caelestis’ scanner captures a full picture in seconds utilizing the Digital camera Module — positioned above no matter doc is to be scanned on a 3D-printed overhead mount. On the software program aspect, a Python script makes use of the PiCamera 2 library to seize photographs after which the imutils, numpy, and cv2 libraries to course of them for automated perspective correction and cropping.

Caelestis’ full information is out there on Instructables, together with the STL information for printing the framework to carry the Raspberry Pi and digicam.