Just cut a slit the shape of the cardboard profile in the top of the pasta box and shove the cardboard in?
You would still need to fill the box with something heavier than pasta.
Poor man's document camera for videoconference
11–20 of 58 posts
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#12Reminds me a kickstarter project I backed years ago called ScanBox. I still pull it out from time to time to scan documents when traveling, and have used it once or twice for a live document scanner, though the sides of the box make it difficult to get your hand into. These days our team either uses the built-in whiteboard functionality in Zoom, or jump into a Google Drawing or Slides document for the live collaborat…
Had to look this up, neat: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/scanbox-turn-...
Bonus points if someone can sell this feature within a notebook/tablet stand. Modifying a tiny tower stand (https://tinytowerstand.com/) comes to mind.
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#13> frame rate, encoder quality. Especially low end phones do not have enough power to encode highly variable input (see previous bullet), resulting in unreadable images. An encoder setting for low frame rate (e.g. 1-2FPS) and high quality would be invaluable for such an use case.
Ways to go even better:
- Don't use an "FPS" based model of continuous transmission - the paper isn't always updating by default
- In extremely low-bandwidth situations, never update while there's a hand in the frame; only update once the paper image settles again
- Get all fancy with feature detection and draw buttons on the corner of the paper; one of these could be "update" and the device would beep to acknowledge the frame had changed. This is actually practical as not everyone has bluetooth keyboards, audio-based commands would be distracting, and tapping onscreen buttons would nudge the device
- Perform frame border analysis and automatically crop and rotate the actual paper as it's moved around
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#14Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#15Re. orientation: the phone shouldn't be trying to determine landscape/portrait when flat; it should gracefully keep the previous state for at least a dozen degrees. On my 11 Pro it doesn't change until ~40 degrees of attitude.
In Android there's an option to lock orientation.
I believe it is either "force portrait" or "autorotate", there is no "force landscape".
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#16In these situations where you're taking a photograph of writing or a diagram on a piece of paper, it can be surprisingly tricky to get rid of the shading from the lighting conditions and be left with just the content on the page in high contrast. This explanation nails how to do it though: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/compose/#divide Divide a blurred copy by the original and you end up with effectively an adaptiv…
Google has photoscan app on Android that is pretty good.
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#17I don’t want to look like promotional, but recently a professor used an Osmo reflector (https://twitter.com/romps/status/1237617042338897921?s=12) to project class notes and it caught on with teachers.
A team worked through the weekend and released a free app to make this super easy (https://twitter.com/PlayOsmo/status/1241152565083090947).
While the base + reflector is not free, if you already have an Osmo game at home, you can reuse that.
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#18What's more valuable: The box of pasta or the roll of coins providing a counterweight?
I think he goes for the inexpensive solution. He could have used toilet paper as foundation :)