[sane-devel] USB - scanner - devel

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 08:45:27PM +0200, Yann E. MORIN wrote:
> I've just had a brand new Canon CanoScan N676U. I hope it works great as it
> is not yet supported by Sane. That's why I volunteer to add support for this
> device in Sane.
> 
> Could someone please point me to documents / source code / URLs / RFC /
> whatever is of interest to start coding a new backend for sane and to
> understand USB programming (kernel Guys, ideas?) ?

Can you tell us which chip is used by this scanner? Maybe a similar
one is already supported.

First, get the SANE CVS.

Documents: doc/backend-writing.txt (about writing SANE backends)
           http://sanei.meier-geinitz.de/ (about the SANE internal
	     functions, look at sanei_usb especially)
	   man sane-usb for the users view on how it should work

USB programming itsself is pretty easy. You don't need to care about
the low level details in SANE. Write some data and get the result. The
interesting thing is to find out which data and how to interprete the
result :-) 

There are some Canon projects. Maybe the scanners use similar chips:

Canon 1220U USB scanner (wip)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/canonscanner/

Canon N650U USB scanner support (command line program) (wip)
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/millwardjp

Canon N670U USB scanner support [alpha/developers only] (wip)
http://home.t-online.de/home/gunther.mayer/ (look for merlin* files)
Gunther Mayer <Gunther.Mayer at t-online.de>

Bye,
  Henning