Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126919

Nice. It reminds me of a blog of a guy who had mounted a flatbed scanner on an electrical motor to make a digital photo before digital camera existed. He had added one of the resulting picture of his backyard. It was one of the most viral Slashdot post at the time.

Railway operators do this to inspect tracks: Mount a line-scan camera that looks down, get an "infinite" image of the tracks, inspect for anything interesting.

I love this sort of project and write-up. Inspiring to try something a bit different and dance on that line between practicality and artwork. The in-progress "scans" are themselves an interesting stretching of time and space, even if they aren't what the artist is ultimately going for.

Ward Cunningham and I did something similar back in 2008.

We were both at a startup in Portland and our office was along the railroad tracks east of the Willamette. We were up on the 4th or 5th floor right above a lot of train traffic including Amtrak.

I brought in some extra Mac gear I had including one of the early iSight cameras which back then was an external device you stuck on the top of your display and connected to the Mac via FireWire. We set it up and rolled the desk over to the window in the office and turned the camera around pointing down at the tracks and Ward got to work hacking something up to do a slit scan.

It was a fun little project; the speed of the trains affected the horizontal compression of the images. We could tweak the software to expand or contract the size of the image by adjusting the number of slit scans per unit of time. Of course, that affected the exposure but I recall the camera having some automatic adjustments that gave us trouble.

That's about all we did with it. Just a quick afternoon hacking project. Neither of us thought much about it at the time so we didn't save anything.

Not quite in the same spirit but I suppose one could talk of railway operators using the railway network as a flatbed scanner when they send maintenance vehicles out to scan the railbed for defects.

For example: https://railgallery.wongm.com/ev120-inspection-vehicle/F144_... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TKDw2E_PBQ

If you want to play around with slit scanning, I made this little toy a number of years ago and frequently find myself using it on trains:

https://slitscan.space

Press and hold your phone screen to switch between the front/back cameras, or hit "c" on a computer. Tapping the screen saves the image, as does "s".