My last scanner was never this naked. Shielding was only removed when necessary, and I certainly never took the camera out. But this time, since I'm going to be packing new stuff in (and will have to lift the machine onto its cart at some point), everything that can come out, does come out.

This fun ~40 pound chunk of camera is the one that required the fancy LVDS capture card --- while I do have another one of those, this machine had the cable with 50 pins snipped when it was decommissioned. I'd have to solder those on all by hand and anyway, the detector is horribly obsolete and probably where the biggest gains have been made over the last 20ish years. 

Here's what will be going in instead:

Not exactly where it'll be in the vertical direction --- Those vertical trusslike supports may or may not be bolted into the steel base of the system from the bottom, so should probably be removed. And yet, if I were to tilt the detector back a little bit, I think I have just enough room to fit it in...  and a tilted detector would be perfect for flat things like pokemon cards... hmmmmmm...! 

I'll decide after I can power and connect to the detector, which is something I'm working on --- updates on wiring and suchity such in the next post, I think. 

Speaking of powering and connecting, you'll need a PC, right? I was trolling facebook marketplace for a while and got this gaming PC for $450 --- decent price and huge upgrade from the last setup running purely on CPU with windows XP, which is my current benchmark. 

  

That actually looks like a pretty attractive setup for the moment! ...although the monitor with no stand was secured from a trash heap, and is currently propped up on a piece of lead shielding. And the PC should go underneath, and the lightning doesn't do anything, but looks neat. I'm actually not really a computer guy who talks about his error correcting ram and gpu flops and whatnot; again, I just figured it would be a big upgrade from the previous setup (while pathetic compared to what I use in industry), and made sure I had enough spaces for additional slot cards. You can zoom in to the screen to read the specs if you want. 

And what is that on the screen... is that the old software for controlling the motors and x-rays?!? what the heck! No way! and it's connected? On WINDOWS 10?!? 

Oh, but it is. You can see above how I have the case and machine positioned to be able to connect all the interlocks and suchity such so I can get the machine turned on while I work on it --- I did this with the 1st machine too. Then I wired up everything from the control boxes to the machine, connected the main panel control to my computer via RS232-USB, and realized I had forgotten the power key back in my home state. 

Crap, but not a show stopper by any means. Because as you can see, I had criminal tendencies as a teenager. 

And whammo! Machine powers on! Nice! But surely windows 10 would not be compatible with an application designed originally for windows 2000, right? 

...wow. I have to have the machine physically connected, and install a super old .dot framework, but incredibly the core motor and x-ray control gui absolutely does work. This will save me a LOT of work. I was prepared to go and use a Pi and my own stepper motor drivers to control motors directly; now I can just tap into this thing --- either write something that interfaces with the gui directly or reverse engineer the commands it's sending and receiving. Fantastic. 

The shutter server doesn't work, of course, and reconstruction and scanning is hopeless as well (especially considering the use of the new detector). But I would call this a qualified success. 

My immediate next plan is to to get the detector powered up and connected; I also have to do the same with the new (not the same control scheme or footprint) source.