High-Five Scanner

We've designed a feed-through scanner that is designed to scan images off an 8½ x 11 sheet of paper in black-and-white (but can actually scan a sheet of any height; a thinner sheet is scanned as if it's 8½ inches wide and the extra values are scanned in anyway).

The scanner feeds continuously until it "sees" the paper under its sensor then continues to scan the entire sheet. A program runs both on the Windows station and on the brick: the brick moves the scanner across a line of the page, reading light values as it goes, sends it to the station, moves the sensor back to its home position, then feeds the paper through one "pixel size" and repeats until the paper is fed all the way through.

Once the sheet passes completely out past the sensor, the light values, stored as an array of integers in the PC program, are converted into a black-and-white bitmap using a bitmap library we found at http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~slabaugh/personal/c/bitmap.c, which then opens automatically in MSPaint.

Due to the general crappiness of the light sensors, our best resolution is 4.68 dpi. Don't use our scanner for your history report, unless you're writing in real big text.