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

And the question of where to place the mirrors gets tricky. I'm not 100% I can even place them appropriately without getting really complicated with multiple mirrors, or having the mirrors be in the path of the disk

Mirrors could also cause a slowdown: if I can't mount them well enough that the motion of the disk and drive mechanism doesn't shake them, I've got to add an additional delay while I wait on the mirrors to stop vibrating so I can get a clean picture