Unique insight into mobile and wireless tech –
Paul finds that trying to go paperless involves lots of paper, and looks at an innovative single-board computer
There’s a very good chance that you’re reading this column in a paper copy of PC Pro magazine. I’ve been told that some people with electronic subscriptions will even print out these Real World columns in particular, in order to read them. There’s just something about paper, isn’t there? And it isn’t going away. Tech companies have tried to replicate paper with E Ink displays, and some of these are very good indeed, yet the postman still shoves a pile of paper through my letterbox every day.
We were supposed to be getting away from this, weren’t we? Letters were going to be replaced by email. Websites were going to replace catalogues. And e-readers would mean that nobody would ever buy books again. Okay, some of this has happened to an extent, but most of us are still receiving letters and catalogues in the post. And every high street still has a couple of book stores.
Paper just feels “right” for so many things. Even for traditional on-screen tasks such as programming, which normally involves typing code into a window within an IDE, I find that if I’m stuck trying to fix an obscure bug then I’m much more likely to find it if I print out the offending chunk of code and study it using the paper copy, scribbling on it using coloured pencils. And I’m pretty sure that this isn’t an age thing – I’ve seen many a young whippersnapper coder doing exactly the same.
In reality, the term “paperless office” seems to have been a joke foisted on the world in 1975 by an article in Businessweek magazine. That article, “The Office of the Future”, is usually cited as the first use of the term, and it’s been trotted out routinely ever since. But the concept hasn’t come to fruition, and I can’t see it happening any time soon.
There’s a problem with paper, however: storing the stuff. There’s the ecological problem, too, but that’s taken as read – if you’ll excuse the pun. When it comes to paper documents, it’s possible to chuck some of it into the recycling bin (or the shredder), but others, such as receipts, are important to keep. I also tend to hang on to bank statements, which might seem odd in an age of online banking. However, banking IT systems don’t have a great reliability record of late, and there’s a chance that when I come to do my tax return at 10pm on 31 January, my bank’s online systems might not be available.
So, most of us will have a stack of paperwork sitting somewhere in the house. Some of it will need to be kept (contracts, house deeds, warranties), some can be thrown out, but there will be items that are time-sensitive, too. For example, bank statements are important for a year or so, but can be disposed of thereafter.
The problem is, for those who aren’t particularly organised (and I include myself in this group), the mountain of old documents just gets ever bigger. And I suspect I’m not alone in this.
So a while back I started looking for technology to help me get things in order.
“There’s just something about paper. And it isn’t going away”
“If the iX500 has a Wi-Fi connection, it will magically squirt things out onto the internet”
What I needed was a scanner, but not just any old scanner. A flatbed would be useless for this task, as it would take ages to scan all my old documents. What I needed was a sheet-fed scanner that would take a bundle of documents at a time. I also wanted something that would help me to automatically sort the documents the device had scanned, perhaps by doing an OCR pass on them. And then maybe shunt the resulting scans off to one of the many cloud storage providers.
There are a few products that will do that, but it usually involves running software on a local PC for the grunt work of document processing, and then sending the files off into the cloud. In an ideal world, I wanted something that would run standalone. A scanner that I could take into the junk room where all my old filing is kept, feed a load of papers in, and then, without any other intervention, it would all arrive neatly filed in Dropbox (other cloud storage providers are available), sorted into different folders depending on the document type.
I did much searching for such a product but couldn’t find a scanner that did exactly that. However, I did find something that comes pretty close, in the form of the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500. It looks like many other sheet-fed desktop scanners, and it scans very quickly even in duplex mode (no need to turn the paper round to scan the other side). It isn’t a new device, by any means – I think it’s been on sale for at least five years – but it’s a reliable workhorse.
The iX500 isn’t sold as a photo scanner, but it does a great job here too. And, being a duplex scanner, you get a copy of anything scribbled on the back of the print – or, with some old photo labs, the processing date. I’m sure some of you are screaming that I should be writing “full duplex” here, but “duplex scanning” seems to be one of those industry standard terms that are almost deliberately designed to annoy us pedants!
I haven’t measured the speed of the scanner – Fujitsu rates it at 25 pages per minute, and I have no reason to doubt that figure – but it’s certainly very quick. And you can stack around 50 sheets in the hopper. I’ve found the paper feed to be reliable, and it has an ultrasonic sensor that detects double feeds – it somehow senses the air-gap between the two sheets. It also uses separate feed and brake rollers to minimise double-feeds. I can’t remember the last time I had a misfeed, and the scans usually come out dead square, too. Although it’s primarily an A4 scanner, there’s a carrier sheet you can use to scan folded A3 documents, which it will stitch back into a single document.
The rollers inside the iX500 are apparently good for around 200,000 scans. A sheet of A4 weighs around 5g, so 200,000 scans is, quite literally, a tonne of paper. Replacement rollers are available, which tells you that Fujitsu expects the iX500 to be a serious workhorse, despite being a relatively small desktop device.
You can scan to a PC (Windows or Mac) via either USB or Wi-Fi, and to mobile, too, which is pretty neat. You pop in a document, and a few seconds later it appears on your phone. For me, the killer feature is being able to scan directly to the cloud, with no intermediate PC required. As long as the scanner has a Wi-Fi connection available, it will magically squirt things out onto the internet. The system currently supports Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Expensify, Google Drive, Google Photos, OneDrive, Shoeboxed, Concur Expense and QuickBooks Online.
You can even set different endpoints for various types of documents. So you can despatch receipts to Expensify, photos to Google Photos, business cards to Evernote, and general documents to a Dropbox folder. You don’t have to pre-sort the pages before scanning them – this all happens automatically and in real-time. Just occasionally documents will get mis-recognised. On occasion I’ve found taxi receipts appearing with my photos, but this doesn’t happen often.
Documents saved to cloud services as PDF get the full OCR treatment, too, making them fully searchable. You’ll find many online reviews complaining that this is missing, but it’s a new feature that Fujitsu quietly enabled last year. It made an already very usable workflow considerably better. There’s been a number of similar improvements over the years – it’s great to see a company still supporting and continuing to develop a five-year-old product!
The OCRing of documents is also used to determine the filename of the scanned documents. You can, if you want to, use the date that you scanned the document, but it’s far better to allow the software to extract the date from the document itself. It makes the storing of items such as bank statements and letters much easier.
The only thing missing from my wish-list is the ability to identify particular types of documents and place them in separate folders. But that’s a job that’s pretty easy to do manually, based on the file name.
There’s a bundle of PC and Mac software supplied with the scanner, but apart from at initial setup, I never use it. I just press the button on the scanner and, a few seconds later, the documents appear in my Dropbox. It really is that simple, and the whole process is super-reliable.
I even ended up buying the iX500’s little brother, the iX100. It’s a portable A4 scanner – a tiny little thing. It runs off a built-in rechargeable battery, and only scans single-sided. It’s significantly slower than the iX500, but the scanning quality is just as good.
The only problem I’ve had with mine is that, sometimes, when just switched on, it won’t register on my Wi-Fi network. As such, I have to flick the network switch on the scanner a couple of times before it sorts itself out. I’ve never had that problem with the iX500.
Despite that little quibble, the smaller scanner is great. I have the iX500 in my office and the iX100 in a kitchen drawer, in the vicinity where I open my post. I can quickly scan anything interesting before putting it in the bin. The iX500 is used more for big scanning runs, large documents such as contracts, and slowly trying to reduce the pile of ancient documents I have in storage.
Of course, after scanning in all of my old documents I can then begin the fun job of shredding them!
On display
I know that a lot of you like to play with various single-board computers. In the past I’ve written about various flavours of Raspberry Pi, its rival Orange Pi, Arduino boards, plus ESP8266-based kit. There’s so much choice out there. Some are great for low-power uses; others have built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Most also have various add-on boards available – there’s a whole industry out there creating such items. They tend to be cheap, too. Just take a look at some of the kit sold by the likes of Pimoroni ( shop.pimoroni.com), which is one of my favourite sellers.
An item that Pimoroni doesn’t (currently) sell but which I’ve been using a lot recently is the WIFI Kit 8 from Chinese company Heltec Automation ( pcpro.link/290heltec).
It’s a tiny thing, much smaller than many other single-board computers. Very cheap, it includes an ESP8266 CPU and a USB port (driven by a CP2104, so no problem finding drivers). There’s onboard 802.11bgn Wi-Fi (no 5GHz, which is a shame), and plenty of usable I/O ports including analog, digital and serial. So far, so ordinary. What sets this particular board apart is that it has a built-in 128 x 32-pixel OLED display.
Like many such boards, the easiest way to program it is by using the Arduino IDE. You’ll find everything you need to extend the IDE to cope with ESP8266 boards at github.com/ esp8266/Arduino. Just follow the “Installing with Boards Manager” instructions. You’ll need to select Generic ESP8266 Module, then set the CPU to 80MHz, 40MHz flash, DIO flash mode, 921600 baud, 4M (3M SPIFFS) flash size, and set the Reset Method to nodemcu. With that done you can upload sketches to the board.
A good one to start with is the Wi-Fi scan sketch. Open File | Examples | ESP8266WiFi | WifiScan, and upload it to the WIFI Kit 8 board. You’ll see the output from the sketch if you open the serial monitor within the IDE. At this point, you won’t see anything useful on the display. Incidentally, you might find specific WIFI Kit 8 support available if you do a search within Boards Manager, but I’ve always found using the Generic ESP8266 Module is more reliable.
You can use any SSD1306 library to drive the OLED panel, but U8g2 (which you’ll find at github.com/
olikraus/u8g2) is particularly versatile. When you install U8g2 into the Arduino IDE, you also get a copy of U8x8. The latter is text-only, using a fixed-width 8 x 8-pixel font, but it uses hardly any resources. U8g2 is much fancier, with a choice of fonts and drawing lines, boxes and circles. However, it uses some of the board’s RAM as a buffer, plus you’ll notice that it can seem slightly sluggish compared to U8x8.
U8x8 may appear compromised with its 8-pixel fonts, but there’s actually a choice of several available – see pcpro.link/290U8x8 for the current list. The library uses the drawString function to write to the screen, but there’s also draw2x2String that draws double-sized characters, while draw1x2String produces tall, narrow text.
So, despite the cut-down nature of the library, it remains pretty flexible. Many people instantly reach for U8g2 without even considering its lowerfootprint cousin. But if you do use U8g2, you’ll need to set the clock pin to 5, the data pin to 4, and the reset pin to 16 in your code.
So what’s the WIFI Kit 8 board like in use? Well, when it works, it works well. There are some rough edges that cause it to crash with certain sketches, but these crashes are repeatable and happen straight away. When you get a sketch working, it will run for weeks without any problems.
There’s much you can do with this board. One thing I haven’t touched on is that it can run FreeRTOS, the Amazon-backed real-time operating system that has deep integration into the company’s cloud infrastructure, including AWS IoT core and AWS Greengrass. But that’s a topic for a future column.
“What sets the WIFI Kit 8 apart from other boards is its built-in OLED display”