BrickPi Bookreader

If you want to digitize a book, there are mechanisms available. However, most are too big, too error prone or too expensive for personal use.

The BrickPi Bookreader strikes a balance by using the Raspberry Pi to do the heavy processing and the BrickPi as the interface to the real world, controlling the NXT motors to handle page turning.

To make an automated system that reads a book aloud we need a few tools (some that already exist):

1. A software setup which can take a good picture of a page, perform Optical character recognition (OCR) on the image to convert it to text, and a Text to Speech (TTS) engine that can read the text aloud.

2. A mechanism which can turn each page, automating the system.

For step 1, we have some open source software that does the job very well. With the Raspberry Pi as the brains of the operation and the official Raspberry Pi Camera as its eyes, the size of whole setup is considerably smaller than Google’s.

The second part is a bit tricky. When we started, we assumed there were be some decent projects out there that did the page turning.

So after digging around we found nothing so we set out to build our own. The biggest challenge of the project was creating a good page turning mechanism. After some research we found the Google Book Scanner, which turns the pages well but is beyond the scope of almost anyone but a corporation. We also found Scanbot, which works well but requires a lot of moving parts with a lot of precision timing. Building the contraption with LEGO’s is naturally easier.

Instead of diving straight into building a mechanism for turning the pages on a physical book, we decided to build a platform which could read from the Kindle app on a Nexus 7.