BrickPi Book Paper Reader
A few months ago, we made a Bookreader powered by the BrickPi which had the ability to read pages from your Kindle. There was a huge response to the project. But what everyone really wanted was a bookreader that could read a real paper book.
Here we present to you the BrickPi Bookreader 2 which can read aloud a real book (the voice becomes a bit irritating after a while) and also turn the pages of the book (we are really proud of this).
3. Working
Since we already had the software with the character recognition and text to speech part worked out, the only thing that we needed to develop was a good page turning mechanism and synchronize everything properly.
We accomplished the page turning by using two EV3 motors, and a LEGO wheel.
The page turning mechanism works as follows. A wheel, which is a bit heavy, rotates for a fixed time and pushes the page up (this is much easier said than done), our friends friction and gravity help a lot here (it required a lot of fine tuning the variables like motor speed, wheel placement, time, etc. to get it to work properly). Once the page is up, another motor rotates an arm 360 degrees and it turns the page over.
Then the Raspberry Pi takes a picture of the page, Tesseract OCR converts it to text and espeak speaks it aloud through speakers connected to the Raspberry Pi. And the whole process is repeated again.