[sane-devel] Most Hackable Scanner?

[Daniel Reetz]

Hi All,

My summer project is to build a scanner camera. I've done my reading
and Googling, and found a few people's projects.

I've seen the work by Wandel,
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html

Tom Sharpless,
http://home.comcast.net/~scancams/

Andrew Davidhazy,
http://people.rit.edu/andpph/text-demo-scanner-cam.html

and recently this one made from an epson GT-S620 (anyone know the
North American designation for that thing?)
http://hackaday.com/2009/06/09/130-megapixel-scanner-camera/

Basically, in a dream world, I'd have a scanner that did nothing but
move and read out the CCD blindly, all other processing being done in
software after the fact. To what extent is this currently possible,
and are you aware of any particularly suitable hardware candidates?
Low-cost is preferable, but far from a deal-breaker.

I have spent some time hacking on scanners in the past, trying to
disable startup checks and calibration sequences in hardware, and had
little luck. But I have a strong suspicion that most of my problems
come from using crappy scanners on Windows, and so I'd like to start
using SANE to get much more control over the hardware. I see from the
SANE site that many Fujitsu and Epson scanners have "complete" support
(http://www.sane-project.org/cgi-bin/driver.pl?manu=&model=&bus=usb&v=&p=),
but I'm not sure exactly what that means in terms of my project.

Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry for the long message, and regards,
Daniel Reetz