Hi!
While I’m slowly building my own OpenScanTable, I have made my own poor-man version, which I named ‘RevoPI’. So far I can only guarantee that it works with Windows, no idea about MacOS.
As the name suggests, it is based on a Raspberry Pi. Best approach is to use a Zero, because it can get power from on the first microUSB port, and use the OTG connection of the second microUSB. For other models, you will need a special hub as you must use the only available microUSB/USBc port for everything.
-It connects to the turntable via Bluetooth
-It connects to the laptop as an OTG keyboard. There are several tutorials in internet, but the one that worked better for me was Key Mime Pi: Turn Your Raspberry Pi into a Remote Keyboard · mtlynch.io.
The approach I followed was to rely solely on CLI scripts. The script (written in Python) reads a text file (given as argument) which contains all the commands you want to execute:
Each line corresponds to a ‘Round’. Each round have the following parameters:
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- Tilt to a desired angle
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- Angle of each rotation step
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- Number of rotation steps
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- Delay between rotation steps
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- Delay between each operation in the round (except rotation)
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- Rotation speed
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- Rotation reset. What to do once all rotations have finished. You can reset to angle 0, to the angle at the beginning of the round or just do nothing.
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- Tilt reset. To return the tilt angle to the origin (or not)
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- Scanning mode. To act assuming that revoscan is configured in continuous mode (by default it assumes it is sigle shot mode)
RevoPI will send a ‘space’ stroke in the middle of a rotation step, or one at the beginning and one at the end if working in continous mode. Of course, Revoscan must be running, with a scan connected, and you need to put the focus on revoscan after launching the script on the RaspPI terminal.
In the example, there are four rounds:
- Tilt angle of -10, 5 steps of 5 degrees each. Rotation speed of 36 sec/round, delays of 2 secs. When finished, go back to the initial angle.
- Tilt angle of 0, again 5 steps of 5 degrees each, this time the delay is increased to 5 (to allow me more time to change the scanning mode in Revoscan…
). When finished, again go back to the initial angle. - TIlt angle of 0, this time just one step of 25 degrees, scanning in continuous mode. Leave the angle as it is at the end.
- Tilt angle of -10, 2 steps of 3 degrees each, scanning speed reduced to 60sec/turn. Reset tilt/rotation at the end
In the following video, you can see the how RevoPI interpreted those instructions:
Next steps will be to polish the python script and upload it in Github.
Many thanks to Michael Lynch (the creator of the OTG solution) and @SphaeroX , because he was the inspiration for my idea.
BR,
Roberto
thanks for sharing and all the input