[sane-devel] Support for Alcatel Speed Touch ADSL internet scanner?

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 11:51:43PM +0100, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> I have run "sane-find-scanner" on a machine with the Alcatel Speed Touch 
> USB ADSL Modem connected:
> 
> [root@majax root]# sane-find-scanner -q
> found USB scanner (vendor=0x06b9 [ALCATEL], product=0x4061 [Speed Touch USB ]) at libusb:001:013

> Not only the three connected scanners are listed, but also the Alcatel 
> modem. I didn't know that this device is an internet scanner.

Well, it could "scan" some of these nice photos that are told to be
everywhere in the internet :-)

> In Mandrake Linux this causes the problem that Harddrake lists this 
> device in the scanner sub-directory and users get confused. Perhaps 
> there is a bug in "sane-find-scanner" which makes the modem recognized 
> as a scanner.

I wouldn't call it a bug. It's a design principle. There is no USB
scanner class so you can't ask USB to list all scanners.
sane-find-scanner lists all devices that may be scanners. It checks if
the device isn't a hub, a printer and so on. So basically all
vendor-specific devices are listed.

That's the reason for the "(probably)" in the output of
sane-find-scanner:
  # Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be supported by
  # SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage.
    
All scanners should be detected but some other devices, too. E.g. I
have heard about card readers that are found by sane-find-scanner.

> D:  Ver= 1.10 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS= 8 #Cfgs=  1

Class is vendor specific

> I:  If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=(none)

Interface is vendor specific. I don't think there is an easy way to
detect that this is not a scanner. Maybe because of it's many alt
settings? But you never know if a scanner may provide such settings,
too.

> P. S.: Or are there any volunteers to write a SANE backend for the 
> Alcatel Speed Touch internet scanner.

You asked, you write the driver :-) Press the scan button and you get
one random image from internet.

Bye,
  Henning