Pictured: Dual duty-cycle stepper motor logic circuits. I plan on eventually using a computer to drive this beast, but for now some simple controls help with testing out the lead screws and their stepper motors.

This scanner turned out to have an easily hacked interface for its X-direction drive mechanism.

I assisited with the development of the camera itself, then wrote the software to process the output.

Imagine an Arduino, rigged up with an IR receiver, and then pulling the data from that sensor over serial for analysis. You'd get something like this (of course, it'd be in binary form!):

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111000000001111100000000111100000000
111110000000011111111111111111000000001111000000001111100000000111110000000111110000000011
111000000011111111111111111100000001111111111111111110000000111110000000011111000000011111
111111111111100000001111111111111111110000000111111111111111111000000001111000000001111100
000001111111111111111110000000111110000000011111111111111111100000001111100000000111110000
000111110000000011111111111111111000000001111111111111111100000000111110000000111111111111
111111000000011111000000001111111111111111110000000111111111111111111000000011111111111111
111100000001111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
        

But, using this utility, you can do something like:

$ ./binout messybinaryfile.bin 8
___________
_------___
_--____
----_
-----__
--_--_
_--_--_-
_-----
---------
        

Which's a lot easier to follow.