Turn your Raspberry Pi into a Scan-To-Cloud Device | Hacker News Reader

Turn your Raspberry Pi into a Scan-To-Cloud Device

blog.doctape.com

55 pointscedel2k116 comments

There is obvious hack value in this, which I appreciate, but here's a solution for those with a more practical mindset and less time: a Fujitsu ScanSnap connected to a computer running Dropbox. I've been using this setup for years now and I can't image working without it. A single button press scans entire multi-page documents (both color&bw, and both sides of course) into PDFs which land in my Dropbox. I then use Yep to manage them.

Although the use case is probably a bit different, if you ever just need to scan something quickly (and with pretty good quality for documents and such) there are various smartphone apps which do this sort of thing. I use JotNot [0] and absolutely love it. The UI of these things isn't perfect, but it's a lot easier than figuring out how whatever office scanner you've got works.

[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jotnot-scanner-pro-scan-mult...

If you have a networked multifunction printer/fax/etc., read the manual. Odds are pretty good that even a low-end one supports scanning to FTP, SMB, and email. It's worth checking first (some manufacturers require software on a PC instead of having the capability in the device), but you can get something that'll do this for less than $100 (Brother MFC-J430w supports scan to FTP, as do most Brother devices).

Yeah I recently bought an HP Officejet Pro 8600 which supports scanning to a network share without using a computer, very handy.

This is a good way to go.

My ancient brother multi supports Scan to FTP, so I set up an FTP user with a home directory inside my dropbox folder. Shared that folder with the wife, and now we can scan and have docs magically appear on all of our laptops in a predictable place with no drivers or software to screw around with.

If my wife can use the scanner, I'm doing something right :-)

Be careful! Scan-to-cloud/email is patented!

We did something similar at YC-Upverter hackathon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2CsOX-DhOM

Scan to dropbox.

Nice, but... the entire first paragraph is unfair. If he's going to be setting something up, it doesn't matter if it's a traditional scanner or a raspberry pi.

Agreed. Forget the setup altogether and try something like http://boomfax.com

It, obviously, does faxing, but it also can send scans to dropbox or you can just email them out...

Isn't there someone out there actively sending patent troll letters to anyone who scans to the interweb?

Yeah, there is even a comment that links to this article by ars technica http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/patent-trolls-wan... which talks about Project Paperless LLC, and several other spin off entities which now do this kind of patent trolling, along with the site "Stop Project Paperless" trying to gather support against the Patent Troll.

What I find troubling is that there is no larger site to check up on past history of patents by patent number and whether there are reports of patent trolling using these patents. If there were, it could be used to interconnect business owners to put money together to contest the patent in question. I mean this particular troll in the article I linked was demanding 130k USD from Blue Wave, and the USPTO estimates the cost of an inter partes review at about 193 thousand dollars per patent. Which means if they attempt to extort more than 200k from each patent spread over different businesses, it would make sense for these businesses to pool their resources for an IPR. That would kill the patent and likely, as patent trolls cast their nets large, be cheaper for the individual businesses.

But then I'm neither an expert on the topic nor a lawyer, so this is milkmaid patent advice really.

Just buy a Doxie Go and an EyeFi card.

http://www.getdoxie.com/product/doxie-go/index.html

This is the most convenient and expeditious solution, but OP's suggestion is a cool and interesting hack.

Is anyone else not loading the images on that page?

Working on it! :-)

Fixed it!

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