« Terraform Steam Bot Miniatures
Jake of All Trades – Blog of Interesting Creations »

The Opti-Transcripticon – Scanner Mod

The Opti-Transcripticon Scanner

Now, isn’t the above a perfectly lovely looking grimoire? With that metal latch and embossed gold pattern, down to the little brass corners, it looks like its a book that has some really important things in it – well, much to many people’s surprise I’m sure – its actually a modded flatbed scanner!

The Datamancer has recently finished its conversion, and has a great many pictures of the process that he went through – including proof of it opening, in case you don’t believe me that it’s not a real book. *chuckles* Its a very clever mod – and I’m doubly impressed with the embossing, and clever use of ribbon for the gilt edges of the pages. Very well done – it must be the best looking scanner to be found! (I’m sure somehow the idea of a book ‘eating’ the information of other books pressed against it, is fuel for a short story or two.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 3:52 pm by Tinkergirl and is filed under Steampunk Images.

  • Hehe yep thats that one. Thanks to JH for pointing toward the donor image for vector-tracing. It's funny, I bought a whole CD of Victorian page illuminations and ended up just using a random internet image instead.
    :)
    I'm going just to upload those files for you, Jake. E-mail didnt like them very much. I'll send you a link once they're on my server.
    pax,
    -~D~-
  • Hehe, why, wherever did you find that lovely border? :)
  • Hey everyone I just added a cover page to the inside, complete with gold "embossed" page illumination.
    I think for future Opti-s, I'm going to open the scanner and glue a piece of parchment to the back wall, behind the scanner cradle. In fact, I'm damn tempted to hack that scanner out of there and do it to mine. hmmm.
  • Click my name and check out the first project on the page. This scanner is actually a small part of a very large casemod project.
  • Now if that were to be combined with Jack of All Trades' Telecalculograph we could have a full thing going. All we need now is a decent screen mod.
  • "You don’t go to a museum to see the curators, do you? *chuckles*"

    Actually, there was this really cute docent at the Met . . . ;-)
  • Yeah but there's still something to be said for journalistic diligence and presentation. I think it's less like seeing the curator and more like seeing a well-made magazine spread and thinking "wow, the writing and layout was very nicely executed."
    So to reiterate my email, thanks for the posts and keep up the good work!
  • Tinkergirl
    Oh now - all I do is collate, people like yourself, Datamancer and Mr Hildebrandt do the actual creating. You don't go to a museum to see the curators, do you? *chuckles*
  • Nice work Doc!

    And congrats to TinkerGirl as well, this is maybe the third or fourth time in recent days I've seen Brass Goggles posts "via'd" in Make:Blog.

    Jake.
  • andy_w
    Think I may modding my old ps2 ... not sure how ill have a think
  • ILLYA
    hehe
    ya you'd be surprized what people throw out espesially in spring i found a couch thingy and sold it to some thriftstore for $150 so if your not guna' make something then sell it and use the money to make something.
  • Thanks HP,
    I think you'd be surprised how little this thing cost me. The scanner was donated by my roommate, but it only cost him about $60 on ebay. The cover was made out of big pieces of clipboard, the leather was from this big document satchel thing that my aunt got at a garage sale for a dollar, and the black triangles are the corner tabs from 2 freebie desktop plotter calendars. The metal frame that houses the scanner was made from scraps of a refrigerator that I cut up a while back for the raw steel. So basically all I had to actually buy was some $5 brass book corners, a $3 jar of embossing powder, and a glue pen (i got a set of them for $11, but you could get a single pen for $2). Don't ever let poverty hold you back. Damn near everything on my website was made with almost no budget. Resourcefulness is the best talent to cultivate. Make poverty your muse. I always get my best ideas rummaging through garage sales, ebay, and people's trash.
  • Heavyporker
    I am... *extremely* impressed! The quality is unbelievable. I'm actually enticed to try that for myself. But alas, as a colllege student, my funds do not permit.
  • Thanks Jake, I like your new gadget too...the pen thingy.

    Jarad, The Underwood mod was originally going to use micro tactile buttons, but their duty cycle of 100,000 or so really isnt that much when you start thinking in terms of Words Per Minute, so they would burn out in less than a year. I decided that a more electromechanical method would be better. The basic premise will be similar to the multipledigression mod you may have seen, but a bit cleaner. It will use a contact rod across the bottom of the key shuttle with a series of isolated contact tabs. The additional keys (like ctrl, alt, pgup, pgdn, etc.) will be housed in a small bank of keys off to either side using parts from another identical Underwood.

    Thanks for the compliments, everyone! Keep an eye out for the finished Espada Sueña, coming soon.

    -~Doc~-
  • Jarad
    This is incredibly beautiful. I'm curious as to how the Underwood will be tapped into the PS/2... something I've been dying to try out, but haven't had the resources to delve into. I saw the other attempts - but I want something cleaner, I think. Interested to see how that part pans out.
  • Jake Hildebrandt
    Datamancer, you've done it again!
blog comments powered by Disqus