Automated Slide Shifter for scanning

On a rainy day a friend came by with a Minolta Dimage Scan Dual. He could not get it to work on a Windows XP machine so had no job for it anymore. "You can make it usefull?". Oh yes, I can.

With about 2500 slides on the shelf waited to be scanned manually, the idea came to me to build an assistant in scanning. The unit shifts the rail one step forward, pushes a slide in the scanner and grabs it again after scanning.

The rail and slides are moved by steppermotors, and the motorcontrollers are connected to the PIO. The software used are COM files assambled from ASM source.


Click on pics for larger views

While scanning the first rails with slides, the unit was enhanced.
I have about 10 types of slide masks in the collection and they all differe dramatically. with different widths the grabbing arm needed to be changed throughout the scanning.



One rail with 50 slides took about 1,5 hours to be scanned but, I could do other things in the meanwhile. Ain't computers nice??

Check out the video below!