Hi Mike,
On Jan 29, 2011, at 1:07 PM, Mike Kelly wrote:
> For the sake of future Avision users scanning the mail archive, I'm going to
> list the remaining known issues with the backend. I've only recently taken
> over maintenance of the backend, so this list may not be complete:
I have some information regarding Avision scanners which you might be
interested in.
Around 12 years ago I bought a Canon CanoScan FB-310 flatbed scanner with
parallel
connection (pass-through) for my Windows 98 machine back then. Since I was
already
using Linux back then, I wanted to get that scanner working with SANE,
unfortunately
to find out that it is not supported.
Since I already had (little) programming experience, I wanted to write a SANE
backend
for the scanner myself and decided to ask the manufacturer for documentation. I
figured
out that the FB-310 (like the FB-610) is a rebadged Avision AV-260C scanner, so
I got
into contact with Avision. After a few mails back and forth, they sent me, to
my surprise,
the full source code of their Windows driver.
I never really made any progress in porting the assembly code to SANE (into C),
but
I still have the full source available and Avision provided it to me to be able
to
write a SANE backend, so I think it's ok to share it (besides the fact that I
got that
source code around 10 years ago).
If anyone is interested, I can provide the full source of the Windows driver of
the
Avision AV-260C scanner which also covers some NEC and the aforementioned
Canon scanners. Of course, it certainly also helps improving the Avision
backend.
PS: The Avision AV-260C is a SCSI scanner which SANE has support for, while
the Canon CanoScan FB-310/610 are both unsupported parallel port
scanners.
If I remember correctly, earlier versions of the Linux kernel provided
a SCSI-Parallel
port bridge which could help to get the Canon scanners work with the
Avision
backend. However, I never succeeded in that, but as I said, that has
been long
time ago and I was not really skilled back then. In any case, I think
the
SANE database should be updated to reflect the fact that the FB-310/610
are actually Avision scanners and thus they should be assigned to that
backend (and not canon_pp).
Regards,
Adrian
