RoboScan Is a Raspberry Pi-Based Analog Film Scanner
Benjamin Bezine demonstrated an automatic analog film scanner built with LEGO and works around Raspberry Pi.
During the lockdown, developer Benjamin Bezine demonstrated an analog film scanner that works on Raspberry Pi. With this, you can automatically scan rolls of analog film to get individual digital photos.
The project uses a digital camera with a macro lens that's compatible with libgphoto2 to be able to download images from the camera or upload images to the picture frame. You can use a Raspberry Pi 4 if your camera supports USB 3 or you can even go with the Pi 2 or 3.
The analog film rolls on with the help of 28BYJ-48 stepper motor, which won't cost more than $6. The most aesthetic part of the build, involving the LEGO construction, is available on the Mecabricks website. Now, if you are wondering about the photo detection when the frame is correctly placed, the maker uses machine learning with high performance inference on a Google Coral TPU.
To control the scanning of the images, it uses a web interface and directly downloads the photos from the camera to the Pi. However, if you are thinking of using this on an 8mm video film, the developer is not so sure due to the fact that it uses a very precise film advance mechanism. For this, you might have seen this project.
More details on RoboScan can be found on Bezine's GitHub repo and Reddit thread.
