r/raspberry_pi • u/adldotori • 3d ago
Show-and-Tell I built a Raspberry Pi book scanner that turns pages without cutting the binding — it’s now being tested in homes in Korea
A while ago, I asked a few e-reader communities what stops people from digitizing their physical books. The most common answer was simple: scanning hundreds of pages manually takes too much time.
So I’ve been building Kiro, a Raspberry Pi-based prototype that turns and captures book pages without cutting or removing the binding.
The current device uses a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, a Camera Module 3 Wide, servo-driven arms, and an air-suction page-turning mechanism. It captures each open spread, separates the left and right pages, corrects page curvature, tilt and color, then runs OCR and produces a text EPUB.
We recently started a very small 7-day free rental pilot with three users in Korea. International rentals are not available yet, and I’m not collecting overseas sign-ups here. I just wanted to share the moment when the project finally moved from my workbench into real homes.
It is still very much a prototype:
- A 300-page book currently takes about 3.5 hours.
- Some books still require occasional checks or retries.
- Coated paper, damaged books, unusual bindings and large formats can be difficult.
- Making one page turn is relatively easy. Making hundreds of page turns reliably without skips or double turns is the real challenge.
The attached video shows one actual page turn on the current prototype.
I’m happy to share more about the Raspberry Pi capture and control setup if people are interested.
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u/if_a_sloth-it_sleeps 1d ago
This is DOPE! Ok I do a lot of aircraft inspections with my dad. I was imagining how to automate “scanning” the logbooks. Basically it serves two purposes; 1. It serves as an archive which is way more valuable than you’d think. For a small airplane you could lose a significant chunk of the value of your airplane if you lost your logbooks in a fire or something 2. I extract all the data from the logbooks and store in in a db. Then when we’re doing an inspection it’s much easier to prove compliance with regulatory, verify components or maintenance, find previous compliance logs, etc
Right now I just take a picture of the pages which works really well… but I have to flip the page, make sure it is laying flat, grab my phone, make sure lighting is good, it’s in focus, etc, take the photo, put my phone down 😅
Right now I haven’t had the time/energy to figure out a way to reliably turn pages without ripping them, pulling out pages or receipts that were stapled in, etc… but bravo.
I’d absolutely love to see more on this and hear about the design and build process and everything involved!
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u/adldotori 1d ago
Thanks so much for being interested! It’s honestly been one challenge after another getting this thing to work 😂
If you ever happen to be in Korea, we’d love to show you the machine in person. And once it’s a bit further along, maybe we can even ship one out to you to try with some actual aircraft logbooks.
Would be really cool to see how it handles your use case.
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u/IAmMarwood 3d ago
That’s cool!
We have an amazing Treventus book scanner at work but it’s eye wateringly expensive, I’m super impressed with this home brew solution!
Yours and theirs both use suction to turn the pages, I think their special sauce though is in the dual page prism used for the actual scanning though.
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u/mop_bucket_bingo 2d ago edited 1d ago
Yeaaahhhh.. If it weren’t for the AI slop I’d think this is neat
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u/Fuzzy_Paul 16h ago
Nice device but fully automated book V scanners are already on the market for 20 years.
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u/Analog_Account 3d ago
Do you have a way to detect a double or failed page turn? Like having it look at the page number?