[sane-devel] dell1600n-net backend

[Jon Chambers]

Hi Alessandro,

On Sun, 8 Jan 2006, Alessandro Zummo wrote:
>   SANE actually misses a network transport and, since I'm dealing
> with a network capable MFP too, we can maybe coordinate the
> efforts to create and test one. Let me know if you're interested.

This could be useful.  What scanner are you working on and what stage are 
you at?  Do you know the network protocol?  Do you have a working 
prototype?  Have you made a start on a SANE backend?

>From my side, I have a working prototype (a standalone perl script).  No 
backend as yet (just a dummy one to experiment with the API).  I foresee 
that the main problems will be:

1. Platform independent networking code.  Perl does a pretty good job of 
hiding this.  C headers could potentially be more problematic. 
(Certainly Linux and Win32 BSD socket functions differ - I don't know much 
about other platforms).  A poke around the existing "net" backend would 
probably be instructive.

2. The app does not know how many pages will be received or their 
parameters until the scanned pages arrive (ie: it can specify resolution 
and format but the user may override these on the scanner front panel 
before pressing "scan").  I have yet to figure out whether the SANE API 
will be happy with this (eg: maybe it needs to allocate storage space for 
the scan data before the scan starts).

3. The scan data arrives as either CCITT Fax Group 4 or JPEG format and so 
will need converting to RGB in order to pass through the API.

How does this compare with your situation?

cheers,
Jon

====================== Jon Chambers =====================
  http://www.jon.demon.co.uk, 020 8575 7097, 07969 956575
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