Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️May 15, 2024

Properly photographing a 3.5" floppy disk for archival is annoyingly complicated. The label has THREE sides!

I've already built an automated system to take a picture of the front of a disk, but really I need to take THREE photos if I want to get the whole thing.

That means either three cameras or I need to rotate the disk 90° and then 180°, which is going to really stress the limits of my mechanical engineering skills.

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️May 15, 2024

So the front is easy. The disk slides down a slide, it's stopped by a servo, I take a picture with a camera aimed down at it.

The back... Either I flip the disk, or I have a camera under the disk which takes a picture aimed up.

And the edge is the worst. I can't have a camera aimed at it unless I either move the camera out of the way of the disk, or I make the disk move in an L shape

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️May 15, 2024

How about this: I stick with the "stop disk and aim down" method, but I do it on a transparent surface, and I add some mirrors.

Then the disk can be photographed from three sides at once.

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️May 15, 2024
The only downside then is that the focus can't be exactly right, since the back/edge will be further away. I'd need to either adjust the focus while taking pictures or have some of the sides slightly out of focus
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️May 15, 2024
And the question of where to place the mirrors gets tricky. I'm not 100% I can even place them appropriately without getting really complicated with multiple mirrors, or having the mirrors be in the path of the disk
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️May 15, 2024
Mirrors could also cause a slowdown: if I can't mount them well enough that the motion of the disk and drive mechanism doesn't shake them, I've got to add an additional delay while I wait on the mirrors to stop vibrating so I can get a clean picture
Show threadEsteban Küber May 15, 2024
@foone wouldn't focus and vibration be mitigated by fast shutter speed and high f stop? Then what you need is either high ISO or a lot of light. Alternatively you could see if you can automate your set up to use focus stacking for the different planes.
Show threadEsteban Küber May 15, 2024
@foone there are some cheap used DSLRs with autofocus that might be easy to drive for this purpose, cheaper than a new cheap camera.
Show threadWhine Spectator
@ekuber @foone I'm thinking something like a servo arm that flips a disk over a flatbed scanner in time with the scan head
May 15, 2024 at 10:32pmWeb