And finally, this stupid lil' guy. I think an apt name would be film destroyer 9000. I need to return to this as I do have a lot of negatives to scan. It's more of a prototype of what became the slide scanner.
Important things to learn from this:
- Horizontal mounting of the camera is bad because even if your mount is very firm, it seems like the internal lens elements have a bit of sag or something that causes pitch to be an issue. This wasn't as much of a problem for the slide scanner as that was all done at a much smaller aperture.
- The backlight is basically the same except I used WS2811 addressable LED strip, it turns out these chips start behaving oddly when they warm up which meant calibrating the channels was a huge PITA.
- I used a Pi to control the stepper. This was what caused any damage to the film as the software-controlled stepping was too rough.
- Adjusting the focus by screw rail is much easer than using the lens ring.