Digital photo convertor

Using Arduino Programming Questions
1

Recently I purchased a digital photo convertor that I can feed my photos and negatives to and it digitizes them and stores them on the SD card.

I was not happy with the quality and compression of the resultant images though.

I think I have necessary expertise to build something like this on my own using a stepper motors and line scanners (both of which I plan to salvage from an old scanner) with my trusty Arduino Uno.

Before starting on this though, I want to check if anyone else has attempted something like this and maybe can share the details and pitfalls faced.

Thanks.

2

What do you plan on using for the image processing?

3

bitmap for now. The main components in this is to use stepper motor to advance photo/negative at constant rate and use line scanner to scan each line.

4

The Arduino can move steppers just fine. I think AWOL was getting at, what will you do with the image data itself. There Arduino can't do much with that.

5

Which "photo converter" do you have. I don't think you will beat it with bits from an old scanner.

Mark

6

James C4S,

I'd leave image processing to higher powers (in 32-bit land). Arduino based board will be to capture and save/send.

holmes4,

scavenged parts are just for proof-of-concept. Once successful, I'd go with a CCD or CMOS. I'll need to do more research on this though.

7

nitinsane:
Arduino based board will be to capture and save/send.

With 2K of SRAM, this contraption won't be setting any speed records.

8

nitinsane:
Recently I purchased a digital photo convertor that I can feed my photos and negatives to and it digitizes them and stores them on the SD card.

I was not happy with the quality and compression of the resultant images though.

I think I have necessary expertise to build something like this on my own using a stepper motors and line scanners (both of which I plan to salvage from an old scanner) with my trusty Arduino Uno.

It would be a fun project, but matching let alone beating the scanning quality of a modern scanner with a DIY solution seems very optimistic to me.

What sort of resolution and quality are you aiming to achieve, and for what sort of scan size?

9

With 2K of SRAM, this contraption won't be setting any speed records.

..and a slow, low resolution ADC isn't going to help.
Imagine a fairly low resolution scan of 1024 x 1024 pixels.
So, 1024 x 1024 x 3 (RGB) pixels at around 9500 samples per second is around five and a half minutes.