Scan2Cloud: Automated scanning and transfer of documents to the Cloud

 Scan2Cloud

• There was a need to send good quality prints/scans of documents to a cloud location without much user interaction. Applicable use-cases would be say: send prescriptions, bills, invoice from the front desk etc.
• It has to be simple and should be easily operable by laymen.
• There are many such scanners which provide a similar funtionality but they are limited in their function. Many of these scanners are reasonably expensive, upwards of 15K INR.
• Also a drawback with handheld devices is that there is possibility of a camera shake, lighting, document alignment etc and hence the picture might not be properly taken. A flatbed scanner does not have any of these issues.
• So to provide a remote scan trigger and also a simplified user scan function, a device was created as shown in the picture above.
• Some bit of testing was required to find a suitable scanner for this SBC.
• Also given that there was some experience in builiding an RPi with an enclosure that had buttons and RGB LEDs, it was chosen to implement this device. Blog entry for Customised RPI case with RGB LED, 16x2 LCD and capacitive buttons.
• Automated tools to sense various states of the scanner and upload them via HTTP to a Django server were implemented.
• Sucess/Failure case event alerting was provided by means of the LCD and the coloured LED. The coloured LED is interesting in the sense that if any person unfamiliar with computer usage would still be able to figure out the success or failure status of the document upload. Its a simple interaction, just insert the document in the scanner and press a button on the web app and a high quality document goes seamlessly to a cloud location.
• As can be seen from the video, the RPI keeps "pinging" the server for scan commands and when a user on a web app initiates a remote scan, it senses it and accordingly scans and uploads the document with varying LED color indications and LCD Messages. It scans and uploads the document in roughly 20 secs.