[sane-devel] backend for Dell A920

[Bertrik Sikken]

MERAT Jean-Luc wrote:
> I wish to develop a pilot for the scanner of the printer Dell A920.  
> How do I have to be caught there ? 

Sorry, I don't understand the question.

> Which tools and which language do I have to use ? 

Read http://www.sane-project.org/contrib.html
and also http://www.sane-project.org/backend-writing.txt

I think the first thing to figure out is the chipset of the scanner
part, because I can imagine that Dell does not really design their
own scanner, but instead just puts their logo on some existing model.
First check out the USB id and type it in google, usually you can
do this with 'lsusb -v' on the console.

If it is really a new type of scanner, then you can try to sniff
the USB traffic between the windows driver and the scanner.
If you have some logs of these, put them on the web somewhere
and post a link to the mailing list. This way, the people on the
list can have a look and see if it is similar to some existing
protocol.

I think the best tool for sniffing is sniffusb, from
http://benoit.papillault.free.fr/usbsnoop/

Sometimes you can find out something about the chipset by looking
for strings in the .inf file and the other driver files.

As a last resort (or if you're just really curious), you can open
the scanner and take note of the chip names and numbers.
You will be doing this on your own risk.

The language for writing a sane backend is ANSI C.

> Thank you for your answers.  
> Jean-Luc (a french developer)

Kind regards,
Bertrik


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