DIY 16mm Film Digitizer 

Raspberry Pi Camera Module (any)

Ender 3 Pro

Arduino Uno Rev3

PyCharm

tb6600 motor drive

MR16 LED

Microscopic Lens

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Quad-Core 1.2 GHz 1 GB RAM

Arduino IDE

Nema17 Stepper motor

<html><body>My project is a 16mm film digitization machine that utilizes an Arduino Uno, Raspberry PI 3, a Raspberry PI HD camera, a Pimoroni microscope lens, NEMA 17 stepper motors, and an old projector to preserve memories in under 200 lines of code. The inspiration for this project began over the course of the past few years when I had a desire to locate my father's old high school 16mm football films from the 1970s and have them digitized. I was lucky enough to locate some of my father's game films at the Heinz History Museum in Pittsburgh, PA and they were kind enough to allow me to have them digitized with a 3rd party service they use for this process. Unfortunately each 400 ft 16mm reel cost me over $200 to have digitized. There were a total of eight 400 ft reels to convert and with easy math this adds up to $1600. This was too expensive to continue this process, considering I was able to locate more of his game films in another collection along with many other years of high school football film dating back to the 1950s. My goal was then to digitize all of the films I have been able to find since many others were interested in this content outside of just me and my family. Since I am a software engineer by trade I decided I should make an honest attempt to develop my own digitization machine. There are plenty of Youtube videos describing how to do this but what I think makes my project unique is that I was able to accomplish this with what appears to be far less code and parts. Basically I wanted to keep this as simple as possible while achieving similar quality results that I've seen when paying $200 or more for one 400 foot reel to be digitized. After a few iterative rounds of figuring out exactly how this should work and failing many times I came up with a simple process that I've used to digitize six films thus far. First step is to buy the components, for example: Arduino Uno, Rasperry Pi Model 3, 2 - TB6600 Stepper Motor Drivers, 2 - NEMA 17 Stepper Motors, and a 16mm projector that you don't mind hacking for this project. I also used a 3d printer to create a few small parts to mount motors and an LED but this is not required and you can use any material that works (e.g. wood, aluminum brackets, etc...). The total cost for all of the parts are roughly $532. This is definitely not cheap, however, when considering I've digitized six 400 foot reels already and it cost over $200 for one 400 foot reel to be digitized I made my money back immediately. I've seen some advertisements online charging as little as $70.00 per 400 foot reel but when you have over 30 reels in your possession and want to digitize all of them you cannot justify the cost. This would cost over $2100 to send to the cheapest 3rd party service to digitize. If I utilized the company that charged $200 per 400 foot reel it would cost $6000. The savings is tremendous. At the end of the description I provide a breakdown of the items and their associated cost. The question aside from the cost is the quality. Using the HD Raspberry Pi Camera and the microscope lens has produced great results. Here is my tutorial on Youtube for how I made this project along with a few small clips that are included to show the final result. I will post more detailed tutorial videos for how I accomplished this step by step. <figure><iframe src="https://youtu.be/KYvqTgEYQXA"></iframe></figure> Parts : <ol><li>$173.09 (16mm projector on eBay) </li><li>$79.39 (Raspberry Pi) </li><li>$8.57 (Raspberry Pi Power Cord) </li><li>$18.22 (Raspberry Pi SD Card Pre Loaded NOOBS) </li><li>$78.93 (Raspberry Pi HD Camera) </li><li>$10.71 (Raspberry Pi Case - NOT REQUIRED) </li><li>$27.42 (Microscope lens for the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera) </li><li>$27.89 (Arduino Uno Rev 3) </li><li>$22.79 MR 16 LED </li><li>$21.42 (TB6600 Stepper Motor Drivers) </li><li>$26.80 (NEMA 17 Stepper Motors) </li><li>$21.42 (NEMA 17 Motor Mounts) </li><li>$14.31 (5mm to 5mm Shaft Coupler) </li><li>$9.64 (5mm to 8mm Shaft Coupler) </li></ol> </body></html>

16mm DIY Film Preservation

DIY 16mm Film Digitizer

Preserving the past in under 200 lines of code with an Arduino Uno, Raspberry Pi, and an old projector.