Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Another DIY film scanner

For anybody interested in the film scanning/digitizing aspects of my Cable Car Super8 film, here's a little sneaky peek behind the scenes...

Yes, this really is my home-made 8mm film scanner project in all it's current glory.

There are two 20 tooth sprocket wheels which drive the film along (each one has a stepper motor underneath) and a third stepper to turn the take-up spool. All the stepper motors are running together under control of the Stepper Bee card. The machine vision camera you see is the Sumix 150M.

The light source is 10 rectangular white LEDS with a small piece of opal glass diffuser in front of them.

The 2 sprocket wheels, the 4 pulley wheels, and the film gate are all pieces I've designed in 123D Design and had 3D printed at Shapeways.com.

The camera sits on a Manfrotto plate and there are crude wooden guides for sliding the camera backwards and forward and sliding the main deck from side to side. I pack layers of card under the deck to achieve the correct height. So this is not exactly precision engineering...

Although I've been fooling around with this for quite a long time now, there's still a long way for this to go... Did I mention there is no automation of the scanning yet and that the camera only captures in monochrome? The registration is not great either, but I'm using the Stabilizer in After Effects and getting passable results that way.

I've ordered some more bits from Shapeways so no doubt I will soon be tearing this one apart and starting again...

5 comments:

M0ONH said...

Hi, Im really impressed with your little machine, Ive just started out to build my own little machine.

Having NO experience of 3d modelling I am hitting a wall of knowledge on getting the sprockets made.

Would you be able to provide any more information on how you built the 3d model of the sprockets?

Measurements, etc?

Anonymous said...

Hi, this looks great. Are you able to share your 3d model design, I would like to try print this. Thank you:)

Punchimon said...

Hello. Can you share the 3d print model project? Thank you

Fernando Alves said...

Hi, Can you share the 3D model projetc, please? Do you have a GitHub?

Cheers.

Unknown said...

We think alike! This is more or less the design I plan to build. The large sprockets allow the film to be moved precisely without a need for claw drive.