Thats really Cool! Thanks for letting me know, this might be the impetus I needed to go back to working on the 220 camera!

Hi!

I’ve only ever managed to get the lide30 to play nice. I have destroyed one 110 and two 220-scanners in my efforts to build a more versatile rig.

What happens if you drop the prism back in?

I’ve also speculated about there being som calibration and automatic gain control going on in these newer models. I believe it could be used to normalize the values coming off of the individual sensor segments.

On my latest attempt at a 220 scanner, I actually built a small dimmable LED circuit that I attached externally to try and influence the calibration I thought was happening, but there was a disappointing lack of results. Come to think of it, I still have that rig laying around somewhere, and the experiment may have been flawed, I’ll have a look next time I’m at my workshop. I’ll let you know what I find.

I know that rig is at least functional, as objects placed directly onto the glass renders crude shadows on the scans.

That’s the long answer, the short answer is no, I don’t have any tips, maybe aside from working on fooling the possible calibration somehow.

As far as I understand, BankID actually abstracts away those numbers. FB have to use an API, and more or less receive a true or false on their query.

They recently opened up for using BankID to prove your age at bars and such, and I think they only get to know if person is old enough or not. Not even a number, just old enough.

Thanks!

If you’re interested in photography, building your own camera is extremely rewarding, and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. Hit me up if you need any guidance!

Thanks!

Cabbage covered a bunch of the process below. In this case, I had a neutral grey background and laid on my back, sticking my hands into the view of the camera. And while watching the scan progress on a screen I moved my hands around until I got this.

It’s a fairly cumbersome process, as each scan takes a couple of minutes and any unintended motion gets captured as well. Out of the 40 or so attempts, this one is the cleanest, both with regards to unintended motion, and with the pose coming out the way I wanted it to.

I’m not with that company anymore, but given the right audience, ‘that time the server room blew up’ is a big hit.

It could have gone way worse. A stressful lesson and a good story is best case scenario outcome when stuff hits the fan.

Years ago I worked for a large-ish post production company. They had recently moved into a swanky new location and everything there was tailored to spec, including the server room. In norwegian we sometimes call a server room a ‘machine room’, this is relevant.

As a part of the server room spec, a dry fire suppression system was among the requirements.

The summer of the incident was particularly hot, and we experienced some trouble with our cooling, so a cooling technician was called to have a look. While he was working on the unit inside the server room, he made a mistake that caused all the cooling gas to dump into the room, triggering the fire extinguishers.

A dry fire system works by releasing an inert gas into a space to displace any oxygen, effectively choking any fire. I imagine this is usually done by some solenoids opening some canisters of gas and the room quickly, but gradually becomes oxygen free. Luckily, my boss at the time was present and he quickly got both himself and the tech to safety.

All good right? No. The contractor who constructed the new location had ordered and installed a system meant for maritime machine rooms, not the computer ‘machine room’ we had. In an environment filled with fuel and grease, you optimize towards filling the room with an inert gas as quickly as possible, and it turns out they use explosives to complete the task. In this room there were three canisters in the ceiling with fire shooting out of them, burning pellets to generate the inert gas. The gas and smoke from the canisters combined with the leaked cooling gas, and started condensing.

Into hydrochloric acid.

While all this was going on, all of the servers and workstations were happily humming along, sucking the now extremely corrosive atmosphere into themselves, making sure that every nook and cranny inside and outside got covered in a thin greasy film of acid.

The aftermath: Mine and two colleagues’s summer break was cut short, as we were called in to do damage control. Ripping out and wiping hard drives clean was what we did all summer. With external help we managed to recover all of the data. One feature film was delayed a few weeks. The insurance payout actually made the company a bit ahead financially. As far as I know there’s still burn marks in the floor of the server room, from when flames shot out of the fire extinguishers. Everyone involved now knows what a proper dry fire suppression system for a server room looks like.

The kicker is, the cooling was messed up because a fabric awning on the building had fallen down and was covering the air intake. If anyone had thought to check the roof this whole thing would have been avoided, and that server room would probably still have bombs attached to its ceiling.

Good ifra, unfortunately my engineering skills stop at desk-sized

Hah! Thanks, I’ll let you know! Maybe I can set up some guerilla style exhibition in a nearby alley 😂

Thanks! I appreciate the feedback. I don’t crop shots done with this camera, I want to preserve the organic borders and learn to live with what is captured without messing too much with it.

However, I halfway agree with your observation, on a small screen this really could do with a tighter framing, or maybe bringing the model closer to the camera. But in a larger print (this is one of two shots Ive printed in 80x80 cm), the airy composition works really well.

I refuse to ignore you!

That webside felt like cancer

Deus Ex is amazing, if you can get passed the aged graphics, it’s a masterclass in storytelling and game design.

That’s really nice

As for busy road at night, I’m afraid that with this way of doing scanning photography it would be quite uninteresting. The motion is way too quick, and cars would render as with either weird vertical lines or very small diagonal squiggles, depending on which direction you scan.

I suggest looking up some talks by the Italian photographer Adam Magyar, he’s done some great talks on transchronologal (?) photography, and is a great artist himself.

I haven’t really considered that, I’m assuming the (in this case) vertical sampling is ‘global’, as in the values at each sensor site is locked at the same time and then read out from the serial bus.

If there was a delay, stuff like fluorescent lighting would read as a moire pattern, but I’ve only ever encountered streaking/linear distortion in those circumstances.

I think the ‘griddyness’ or general sense of direction in the water is purely a function of how water moves and not a result of readout delay.

I’d love to be proven wrong, though, so if I can do some experiment to determine either way, I’m all ears.

I love this! The dismissive arrogance is wonderful.

What you are describing is known as a harris shutter, which would be awesome to explore, especially considering the weird way motion is captured on one of these devices.

I don’t think a separate brightness channel is entirely necessary. But if you want to go down that path, I’d start trying out the blending modes in photoshop. There’s probably also some method for taking your RGB composite, and bring it into a colorspace that has a separate channel for brightness, and then replace that channel with your b/w pass. Lab color space should allow you to do this, although I’m not really sure what software to use, or if theres some way of doing This directly in Photoshop.

Thank you!

The n650u looks very similar to the lide 30, so I’ll assume that it’s more or less the same inside.

The sensor assembly is fairly straightforward. A plastic housing that gets pulled by a cord. Once you liberate the assembly from its track/cord/whatever is holding it and moving it around, you get to the good part.

The sensor itself, and the RGB LED that supplies the light is on a PCB that’s mounted to the plastic carriage from the underside, it’s held together by plastic tabs (it’s a few years since I did this, so the details might be off, but it wasn’t a difficult task). Use a sharp utility knife to cut the tabs and remove the sensor PCB. I’ve used strips of gaffers tape to put it all together again. The LED looks like a small white rectangle stood perpendicuar to the PCB, I simply broke it off. This makes the canon drivers throw an error, but VueScan doesn’t care. If you’re squeamish about actively destroying your scanner, you can probably figure out a way to cover it up with some tape or foil.

The circular vignetting you’re seeing is due to the pinhole array, it’s a thin black plastic strip with a bunch of tiny holes set in front of a slit, just rip it off, its either glued or welded in place, but I’ve never had a problem getting it out with some pliers. While you’re messing about in that area, get rid of the prism that spreads the light from LED as well, it probably won’t do much of anything if left in, but it feels better to remove it.

Once you run the camera in this state, you will discover that you get uneven exposure from edge to edge, a linear vignette perpendicular to the axis which the sensor moves. This happens because the plastic housing of the sensor is throwing shade. So use any available abrasive machine, and cut that housing down to its essential functions of holding the sensor in its place, and as a pressure against the glass plate.

Unfortunately I don’t have any large format lenses around, so I’ve stuck a magnifying glass to the front of my camera (you know, gotta keep it punk rock), but the way I handle aperture is by cutting holes into black cardboard (very thin cardboard) at about the size I think will work, and taping the hole across the lens. One of my goals with this project is to try make photography into a tactile, direct and intuitive process so I try to avoid unnecessary machinery.

The reason you’re only getting grayscale is due to how a CIS scanner renders color. During a normal scan, the RGB LED only flashes one channel at a time, and the driver figures out if it’s looking at the red, green or blue signal all by itself, and at the end it interpolates the data to render a full color image file for you to enjoy. I’ve been playing around with the idea of tapping the signal path and use it to trigger an external RGB lighting rig in a studio, to get full color images of models. But so far it’s only a funny thought!

And lastly, the sensor is exceptionally sensitive to infrared light, to the point that the heat from the internal electronics of the scanner causes streaking. I’m using a few pieces of carefully placed aluminum foil to shield the sensor in select areas, and that reduces the issue to a tolerable amount.

Good luck on your build! This project has given me a boatload of insights into both photography, electronics and computing, and I hope you will have a similarly awesome journey.

Edit: im happy to answer any further questions you might have. it would be awesome to see some shots once you get the contraption up and running!

Hey, thanks!

I get you, the guy at the print-shop I use has asked me several times if my art is artificially generated.

I don’t know what you expect as evidence, but I’ll try.

This is a picture from my last exhibition, and the box there is the scanner-camera.

The fabric is 15 meters by 145cm, I have friends holding it stretched out of frame at both sides.

This is another shot from the same shoot. I think it’s very dynamic, but I like the ‘sunbeam’ from the original post better.

And this is a still from a video I took of my friend playing around With the fabric in the wind before she jumped down from the boulder I made her stand on in order to get the original shot.

I hope that covers it. The wavy pattern is due to the linear sampling of the scanner, and the play of motion over time.

For sure.

It’s a canon Lide 30 scanner at its core. You have to remove the light source (a tiny RGB LED) and a pinhole array from the front of the sensor. Then I used a dremel to widen the slit the sensor looks through, to deal with some pretty severe vignetting. The optical assembly is made from foam board, gaffers tape and an acrylic lens liberated from a regular magnifying glass. I use a software called VueScan to perform the actual scan.