[sane-devel] Status of HP ScanJet 4600?

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Sat, Sep 25, 2004 at 01:16:21AM -0400, Ethan Glasser-Camp wrote:
> A friend of mine recently converted to Linux, and has a HP ScanJet 4600 
> that she'd like to get working under Linux. Is anyone working on a 
> driver for it?

At least we haven't mentioned that on the page for that scanner:
http://www.sane-project.org/unsupported/hp-scanjet-4600.html

> If not, how hard is it to write one?

That really depends on how high or low level the scanner chipset is. 

> I'm a computer science undergraduate at Renssalaer Polytechnic
> Institute in New York.  I'm fluent in C but know next to nothing
> about hardware interfaces, USB, or programming for either.

Neither the SANE interface nor the USB access itsself is the real
problem. That's documented and there are already libraries to do that.
The real problem is to find out how the scanner works and to write
that code.

> I understand that such a job would be a lot 
> easier if the chipset were similar to a chipset that is already 
> supported --

That's true. In fact, if the chipset were already supported, it may be
as easy as to add the ids to one of the backends and maybe some data
like its resolution.

> does anyone know if this is the case?

At least sane-find-scanner doesn't know the chipset (see above
mentioned page). That doesn't mean, that there is no backend, because
sane-find-scanner knows only few chipset.

Maybe you can find out by opening the scanner's case and/or by
analyzing the logfiles and com,paring with known protocols.

Bye,
  Henning