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.

Other inventions

[greyguppy]

I personally prefer the wasp-sucker. It looks good, serves a purpose, and has the 'home-made' quality to it.

The marble gun seems dangerous, I can just imagine a kid understanding gun safety, yet building one of those

I DO NOT WANT TO START A DEBATE ON GUN-CONTROL

The Jenga thing however is stupid, as it makes you more likely to lose!

i love his organ (hehe...)

[Mao]

I must say his homemade organ tops everything else he shows on his homepage. From the sound samples he included on the page, it seems the organ actually works quite well. I once did a science project in high school on the accoustics of a violin, and found out accoustics is one fuzzy SOB. The tiniest error in craftsmanship can really ruin the sound. This guy is awesome.

2000x2000

[hatless]

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.

Wasp-sucker and marble crossbow

[Selanit]

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!

Streaking artifact might be "blooming".

[baschie]

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).

Re:High Resolution Vs. High Quality

[psavo]

Yeah, he said he got 2k*2k images out of that camera.

Bigger thing is that because his camera is completely computerized, it can be distortion -corrected. So actually geometrical errors can be compensated for. Same goes for colors (just scan a picture of 'test pattern' and make a grid out of it).
Hmm. Now that I think of, biggest problem is 'keeping image in focus', but that seems to handle well in his pictures.

What i'm more surprised of, is that modern conan 1D / niikon D100 don't have these kind of functions. Niikon _surely_ knows distortion properties of their lenses and they already distinguish lenses with a microchip.

Re:Wasp-sucker and marble crossbow

[cheese_wallet]

"Of course, once you've spent nine hours sucking up a nest of yellowjackets, what do you do with the buggers?"

You freeze them overnight. They don't survive. Yellow jackets are a pretty serious problem here in florida, second only to fire ants.

The bug guys down here vacuum them into a tuperware like container, freeze them overnight, and then sell the carcasses to pharmaceutical companies that extract the toxin from each individual stinger to make an antidotes for people that are unfortunate enough to have disturbed a nest.

"...submerge the capture box, something like that."

That actually doesn't work very well. wasps and bees and such don't drown very fast.

--Scott

Re:Wasp-sucker and marble crossbow

[threephaseboy]

I usually burn them.
A bit of kerosene usually does the trick..