Properly photographing a 3.5" floppy disk for archival is annoyingly complicated. The label has THREE sides!
I've already built an automated system to take a picture of the front of a disk, but really I need to take THREE photos if I want to get the whole thing.
That means either three cameras or I need to rotate the disk 90° and then 180°, which is going to really stress the limits of my mechanical engineering skills.
So the front is easy. The disk slides down a slide, it's stopped by a servo, I take a picture with a camera aimed down at it.
The back... Either I flip the disk, or I have a camera under the disk which takes a picture aimed up.
And the edge is the worst. I can't have a camera aimed at it unless I either move the camera out of the way of the disk, or I make the disk move in an L shape
How about this: I stick with the "stop disk and aim down" method, but I do it on a transparent surface, and I add some mirrors.
Then the disk can be photographed from three sides at once.
The only downside then is that the focus can't be exactly right, since the back/edge will be further away. I'd need to either adjust the focus while taking pictures or have some of the sides slightly out of focus
@foone With some more mirrors you could get all 3 distances to be closer to equal (getting them exactly equal is not that helpful given that even one side is not at a constant distance from the focal point, unless you arrange for some lens arrangement that has an effective focal point very far away).
