Desktop digitizer makes capturing notes a breeze

While it may seem strange today, we have met many creators and hackers who reach for a pen and notebook when learning something new or solving some technical problem. But even if you’re the kind of person who thinks best when you write something down on paper, there’s still a good chance you’ll eventually want to take those notes and sketches into the digital realm. That’s where things can get a little complicated.

(Spencer Adams-Rand) recently wrote in with his clever solution for capturing written notes and sending them to Notion, but the hardware design and digitizing workflow is flexible enough to adapt to your specific needs, especially since he was good enough to publish all the files needed to create his own version.

Whether it’s handwritten notes, old photographs, or legal documents, digitizing comes down to taking a high-resolution digital photograph of the object and running it through the appropriate software. But getting good, consistent photos is the key, especially when you’re reading a lot of pages. (Spencer) started out by simply taking pictures with his phone, but quickly discovered the process wasn’t ideal.

Your custom scanning station addresses the first part of the problem: getting consistent shots. Images are captured using a Raspberry Pi 5 with Camera Module 3 attached, while the device’s 3D printed structure ensures that the camera and integrated lighting system are always in the same position. All you need to do is place your notepad inside the cavity, press the button and it will produce a perfect shot of the page.

Using a dedicated scanning station like this would already provide better results than trying to do it freehand with your phone or camera, but (Spencer) took things a little further. The software side of the project includes a handy user interface on the 5-inch touchscreen built into the top of the scanner, while also providing details like a REST API and integration with the OpenAI Vision API for optical character recognition (OCR).

Those with an aversion to AI could certainly trade this for something open source like Tesseract, but (Spencer) points out that OpenAI’s OCR is not only better at reading your writing, but also generates structured markdown-like data that’s easier to parse. From there it goes to the Notion API, but again, this could be replaced with whatever you use to collect your digital thoughts.

A device like this would go a long way toward answering a question we posed to the community in January about the best way to digitize your documents.