23 May
2012
23 May
'12
3:29 p.m.
But if you
already have a scanner, known to work, and don't have the
parts you mention, or don't have the "model engineer's workshop"
tools...then I have trouble seeing anything wrong with using the
scanner.
Well, the largest scanner you are likely to have is an A3 one (or
whatever the equivalent is). So perhaps 17" on the long axis. Paper tape is punched at 10 characters per inch, so
you'd get 170
bytes off the tape per scan.
Only if you're unimaginative enough to not loop the tape back and scan
multiple segments of it per scan. I have neither scanner nor paper
tape at ready hand, but I'd guess that I'd get some eight to ten
lengths of tape side-by-side on the scanner bed.
Of course, that's only a factor of some eight to ten improvement.
It's still not all that easy (a lot harder for
_me_ tham making a
tape reader from scratch).
Well, sure. We already knew the right answer for you was to build the
reader. :-)
That would,
for example, be my own case - I probably could kludge
something together to pull paper tape past phototransistors, but (a)
it would be a kludge, (b) I don't have the phototransistors,
My projects would
be severely limited if I only used components I
kept in stcok... I do, however,
have a scanner that needs nothing more than plugging
in of wires to work fine.
And software to process the scanned images....