One-button Scan To Email Using Raspberry Pi

one-button-scan-to-email-raspberry-pi

We’ve come across extremely expensive photocopiers that also fax, scan to email, and generally have too many features to list. [Eduardo Luis] figured out how to implement some of this type office magic using very inexpensive components. Specifically, he can press one button to scan a document and send it to an email address.

The user controls patch into the RPi GPIO header. There’s the button we already mentioned, a red LED for “System Busy”, and a green one for “System Status”. A set of scripts montor the button and drive the LEDs. When it’s time to scan, the RPi uses the scanimage package to capture a .PNM file, then converts it to .JPG before sending it via email using the mutt package.

We’d love to see a character LCD and a few more buttons added to the setup. This way you could select between different recipients (or even send via fax). And there’s always the possibility of connecting a printer to the other USB port on the RPi to make it work as a photocopier too.

You can catch a demo video after the jump.

7 thoughts on “One-button Scan To Email Using Raspberry Pi

    1. Makes sense to me – the RasPi isn’t very big and I’d be surprised there isn’t enough room inside a scanner case to hide it somewhere. Repurpose a scanner button for ‘send to email’.

  1. Awesome. Thank you very very very much for doing one of my “when I have time” projects so I can just piggyback on your hard work (when I have time). There’s been little point to scanners that can’t do email directly for most people in the last three or four years.

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