2011-01-28

Page turner Mark II

I have improved my initial page turner design. Thanks to a third motor that repositions the rubber wheel between the left and right of the book, we can now turn pages in both directions!



The device is still manually operated and the problem of sometimes grabbing more than one page remains. But it is now less of a problem, because if we go a few pages too far, we can always go back.


2011-01-27

Automatic page turner

Reading books is hard enough as it is. They're often long, boring and some don't even have any pictures in them. I decided to at least eliminate the physical effort of turning pages and constructed this little device:



At the moment it's not entirely automatic as I'm still controlling the individual motors manually (via Bluetooth from my phone, which is off-screen, because I'm also using it to shoot the video). The setup requires some tweaking for the exact size of the book and probably only works for a certain range of pages in the middle of the book. It also still sometimes grabs more than one page. But hey, it's a start. There's obviously room for improvement, for example it would be nice to be able to turn the pages in both directions. (Update: Here's an updated version that does that.)