In it's day it was like magic, today you could replicate 90% of the function with a single Arduino. How times have changed.
@insanitywolf05
4 жыл бұрын
There's a neural network implemented on the DSP and memory of this thing (articles about the device from the late 90s state that)! Not quite something an atmega could accomplish, at least not without a serious engineering involvement. I'd say in order to build something like that today on a hobby level you would need an atmega or similar driving the ccd array (presumably a tcd1304) plus a pi zero running tesseract for the character recognition....still not difficult, I have to agree
@fredjones100
4 жыл бұрын
I have one of these too, rescued it from being thrown out by a client a few months ago. I think you were maybe a bit quick with your scanning motion for it to keep up with you? Anyway, if you can think of any possible practical use for it I'm all ears - I don't want to throw it out because it works but it's cluttering my desk and I can't for the life of me see any point to it in the real world!
@insanitywolf05
4 жыл бұрын
well think of a job where you on the one hand encounter tons of paperwork and on the other hand have to deal with computers and security/privacy concerns. A great example is the doctor's job in germany (and probably in other countries as well). In the 21st cetury you actually still have to transfer text from paperwork into your computer manually and I still have not found a true HID-capable device that doesn't need installed software on the computer' side. Thinking about hacking this thing by adding a USB-capable micro to it. If it spits out characters via UART this should be possible and actually useful. Current products like the IRIS have a linear CCD and an STM32 just to capture and transfer the raw image data but without the smarts that run the OCR in hardware, so this thing is still useful today!
@MrTamk1s
4 жыл бұрын
I was thinking the device could be used as maybe a 1x24 LCD PC display, using something like LCD Smartie software (Google it) over the DB9-to-2.5mm Stereo Plug, with some hacking. At a bare mimimum, the 1x24 LCD panel is detachable as a separate unit on a nice male pin header, so that could salvaged as a freebie LCD panel for electronics projects (provided you could find an approriate LCD controller chip for that particular display and other circuity, if the device's interface circuity couldn't be hacked to assist with that)
@gregclare
4 жыл бұрын
How does it go with hand written text? Or does it only work with printed fonts? Seems a bit of an I/O loop if it will only scan printed characters. :-)
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