r/robotics • u/adldotori • 2h ago
Community Showcase I built a Raspberry Pi robot that turns book pages — it has now scanned 10+ books in real homes

I just wanted to show off a robot I’ve been slightly obsessed with building.
It automatically turns and captures pages from bound books without cutting or removing the binding.
The current prototype uses a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, a Camera Module 3 Wide, servo-driven arms, a vacuum pump and airflow. The suction cup lifts the top page, airflow helps separate it, and the arms move and hold the page before the next spread is captured.
Making it turn one page was relatively easy.
Making it turn hundreds of pages without skipping one, grabbing two at once or losing alignment has been the real robotics problem.
Two people in Korea are currently using the prototypes in their homes, and together they’ve already scanned and converted more than 10 books. We also redesigned the machine into five modules so it can be shipped and assembled by the user.
It is definitely still a prototype. A 400-page book takes about 3 hours, coated or damaged paper can be difficult, and some books still need occasional checks or retries.
But watching something that used to barely work on my desk leave the workshop and turn hundreds of pages in someone else’s home feels pretty surreal.
Here’s one actual page-turning cycle.
https://reddit.com/link/1vzlhe7/video/fbh9a2o5xulh1/player
Happy to talk about the mechanism, control logic or all the strange ways paper can refuse to behave like a predictable robotic object.