[sane-devel] Adding support for a new scanner (Epson V500)

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Rob Browning <rlb at defaultvalue.org> writes:

# Thanks for maintaining Debian's emacs!

> Has anyone looked in to support for the Epson Perfection V500?  For
> the moment, I have one, and it appeared the SANE packages in Debian
> unstable, at least, don't support that model.

The epkowa backend also does not support this model at the moment.
There is talk about adding support for it through a /non-free/ binary
only plugin, but there is no schedule yet.

FYI, the epkowa backend is part of Image Scan! for Linux which can be
had via:

  http://www.avasys.jp/english/linux_e/dl_scan.html
  http://www.avasys.jp/english/linux_e/dl_spc.html

for scanners and all-in-one devices respectively.
# Eh, yes, I maintain it.

> I glanced around the source a bit, but I'm not familiar enough with
> SANE to know how much work it's likely to be to add support.  I did
> see where the new ID would need to go into epson_usb.c, and I saw the
> entries in epson.desc, but that's about as far as I've gotten.  I
> guessed that epson.c would need to be augmented as well.

The Perfection V500 does not speak the protocol that the epson backend
assumes.  There is just about zero chance that it will work with any
of the other backends that support EPSON devices (snapscan, plustek).
If support for this scanner is added to the epkowa backend, then it
will require a plugin which takes care of the protocol conversion.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen             FLOSS Engineer -- EPSON AVASYS Corporation
FSF Associate Member #1962           sign up at http://member.fsf.org/
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