For these with relations who grew up within the Eighties (or earlier), a slide projector was a fairly widespread approach to share and present photos earlier than the web was a factor. However today, discovering a approach to get folks to sit down and examine these photos in a darkish room with you is even more durable than discovering a purposeful projector. To covert his outdated 35mm slides to digital, photographer Scott Lawrence constructed a customized digitizing system primarily based on a slide projector.
Within the above 8.5-minute video initially spotted by Hackaday, Lawrence walks us by way of the method, issues encountered, and the gear he used to make an Arduino-powered system to digitize/scan all of his outdated household slides.
Beginning with a Kodak Carousel 760, Lawrence changed the lenses from the projector and changed it with a brand new LED panel from a Ulanzi 49 that’s then, by way of a sequence of 3D-printed parts and cables, linked on to his Nikon D70 (set to f22) and a Vivitar 210mm macro zoom lens with a 2x teleconverter added to it to seize every of the photographs projected by way of the slides.
The “brains” of the unit as Lawrence calls it, is an Arduino Leonardo (SS micro) with a six-digit LED show and an Adafruit I2C rotary controller linked to an Infrared LED to distant set off the digicam to seize the slides as they transfer by way of the projector.
In accordance with Lawrence, changing the sunshine bulbs with a compact LED permits for way more exact brightness management and retains the system as a complete a lot much less scorching in comparison with the common incandescent bulbs the projectors normally ship with. Then as soon as began, the Arduino-powered system robotically advances the carousel and triggers the digicam to seize every slide (utilizing the IR LED), making it extremely simple to digitize massive volumes of slides in a brief period of time.
Beneath are some captures created by the setup;
Whereas the setup and 3D-printing could also be just a little overly-technical, Lawrence says the system itself is quite simple and easy. “you place a tray or stack of slides on high, be sure the digicam is pointing at it, in focus, and has its handbook publicity set correctly (i used to be utilizing 320 ISO, f/22, 1/10 sec shutter pace), and begin the controller. Then simply wait 10 minutes, and all 140 slides are captured!”
“If it took too lengthy to do the seize, or any culling was wanted earlier than the seize, it simply wasn’t going to occur. These slides would disappear if nobody did something, so any quantity of capturing of them (even with poor outcomes) is best than not doing something in any respect. For probably the most half, these are household journeys and holidays. Nobody else would care to do it, nor would anybody pay to do it…”
Lawrence says he’s nonetheless engaged on the post-processing facet of the setup. He presently has the photographs positioned in a gallery with a small database on the backend the place the photographs are tagged with what group or “slide tray” the photographs are from and any extra dates or key phrases that could be related to make them simpler to look by way of. His hope is ultimately the software program will be capable of current albums primarily based on the grouping outlined by this database.
The photographer additionally plans on making the software program and 3D-printing recordsdata obtainable on-line through GitHub quickly in order that anybody can use them to get to digitizing their outdated projector slides in order that they could be preserved (and shared) for years to return.
Picture credit: Pictures courtesy Scott Lawrence