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KISSS

Keep It Simple Slide Scanner: a DIY rig that digitises old film slides with a Raspberry Pi, a relay, a slide projector and a DSLR.

DIY hardware
The rig on a table: the slide projector on the left, the Raspberry Pi and its relay board in the middle, the DSLR on the right.

More than 10,000 slides, taken from the early 1960s to the 1990s, had been sleeping in an attic for thirty years. KISSS scans them.

  • The trick: a piece of white material between the projector’s lenses lights the slide, and a DSLR photographs it straight from the projector instead of the projected picture.
  • The automation: a Raspberry Pi advances the projector through a relay and fires the camera through gPhoto2.
  • The post-processing: a Python script crops, mirrors and rotates the scans, and can upload them to Nextcloud.

A tray of 50 slides takes about three minutes. A project from before the agents! (2020)