[sane-devel] Rising project : Support of Konica-Minolta Magicolor 2480MF

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

Hello Jean-Marc,

On Fri, 6 Aug 2010, Jean-Marc CHALLIER wrote:
> I wanted to start the development of a back-end for the Konica-Minolta Magicolor 2480MF Multi-Functional Peripheral (MFP). I have several
> questions :
>  *  Has such a project already been started ? I searched the archives of the mailing list without success, but...

Now, that's a coincidence. Just a few days ago I posted a similar question 
to the list about the magicolor 1690MF... Unfortunately, I did not get any 
response.

Please note, though, that I'm not a sane developer, but I'm looking into 
writing a backend.

>  *  Is there anything special about the programming of an MFP back-end, or does the underlying kernel take care about the printing/scanning
>     mutual exclusion ?

To be honest, I haven't yet thought about this, but I would suspect that 
the other devices don't respond while one is doing some work, or an error 
code is returned.

>  *  Does anyone know where I can get programming information about this device (any experience discussing with Konica-Minolta anyone ?) or
>     will I have to reverse-engineer the communications between the PC and the scanner (gonna be tough...) ?

I tried sending a request to the konica minolta support, but got 
absolutely no response. I did some reverse-engineering, and it doesn't 
seem so hard. It would be interesting to see whether the 2480mf uses the 
same protocol (and if so, what are the differences).

Here are the results of my reverse-engineering so far:
http://wiki.kainhofer.com/hardware/magicolor_scan

>  *  Is there anyone who would like to give me a hand, either with programming or at least with testing ?

I can't help you much with programming, since I don't know the sane 
codebase yet, but at least the data protocol looks like it might be 
decoded.

Cheers,
Reinhold