When I ordered the new Raspberry Pi 3, I took up my Raspberry Pi 2 that had been collecting dust waiting for it to arrive. I had an idea of some things I wanted to prototype, one of which was a sort of online library, where books could be uploaded in the form jpg files for pages, then OCR’ed by the website and presented to visitors as a readable book. After about a week of tinkering in my spare time, Stage 1 was complete.
Using open source like tesseract for the OCRing and Internet Archive BookReader for the reading, the site falls into place pretty quickly, all functioning on a $35 Raspberry Pi. Now that I have the new Pi 3, I’ve actually continued to use the Pi 2 for this project, to help keep things to a lower common denominator.
Over time, I hope to make more posts regarding specific features or approaches, like improving Tesseract accuracy, or creating installer scripts and other things. We’ll see how things go.