Thanks a lot of good tips there . I know that it's not a "let's do a scanner driver thing tonight" thing and can take some time and efforts. Thanks again for the little push ahead !
Marco m. allan noah schrieb: > On 1/5/08, Marco Freudenberger <Marco.Freudenberger at gmx.de> wrote: > >> Hi list .... >> >> I'm urgently looking for a backend driver for a Plustek PL 812 (USB / >> ADF + Flatbed) scanner. Looks like there's (bu-huuuu) currently no >> backend that supports it. >> > > [snip] > > >> But it would be great if somebody could help me alittle to bring me on >> speed making the first baby steps. I plan to use a USB sniffer >> (hardware) on the PL-812 on Windows to try to reverse engineer the >> protocol. I don't think this will be the worst part. But actually, I >> don't know where to start with developing and have a few questions to >> the more experienced guys out there: >> >> 1) the backend-writing doc >> (http://www.sane-project.org/backend-writing.txt) suggest to start with >> a standalone test programm. Is there some kind of a framework or >> existing test programm that can be modified for starting ? >> > > if you use benoit's usbsnoop instead of a hardware sniffer, there is a > program (usbsnoop2libusb) which will turn that into a c prog that you > can hack on. it cannot interpret the meaning of the packets, but it > can be a good place to start. there are also programs in the usbsnoop > dir of the sane experimental tree, which can clean up logs from > usbsnoop as well. i am fond of spike4.pl myself :) > > >> 2) the same document suggest (sounds like a good plan!) to extend >> existing backends whenever possible or use existing backends as a >> starting point at least. Any idea which one could be a good starting >> point for the PL-812 ? >> > > open the scanner and figure out what chips are in it. it may already > be supported by an existing backend, just needs some tweaks to know > about that model. > > >> 3) Is there any further documentation out there to get me on speed ? Or >> books on that subject-matter (also the relevant parts of Unix / USB >> programming that might be needed) ? >> > > google for 'usb in a nutshell', and the usb 1.1 specs. the libusb docs > are almost useless. > > >> 4) What is an ususal ammount of time one would plan for developing a >> backend for a certain scanner ? >> > > >from a couple hours if it is an already supported chip, to hundreds of > hours if it is completely new and you have no docs. > > >> 5) BTW, my environment will be a Kubuntu Linux distribution. Anything >> special about that ? >> > > nope, as long as you install the libusb devel headers and gcc, you > should be good. > > >> Thanks for your help! I know, those questions sound like I will never >> make that happen in a reasonable ammount of time, but once I know where >> to start that will change - I'm really a good and incredible quick >> developer, usually ... >> > > i used to say the same thing, until i developed the epjitsu backend > with no docs. i dont know if i will ever do that again... :) > > allan > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/attachments/20080105/90815e46/attachment.htm
