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

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

Am Freitag, 6. August 2010, 11:12:30 schrieb Jean-Marc CHALLIER:
> Well, I must admit that I only searched for 2480MF, not for other devices,
> given the fact that this seems to be is very specific, even among the
> Magicolor series. First of all, it is USB-only, and if you do a "man
> foo2lava", you'll see the following :
[...]
> ..which means that the protocol is not the same as others. If I can't find
> any documentation, I'll take a look, at least, to the printer driver in
> order to understand a bit more about this 'OPL' protocol.

That difference in the printing protocol does not indicate anything. The 
printing protocol and the scanning protocol/chip are independent, so it might 
still be that the 2480mf uses the same scanning protocol.

> > 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
> 
> Waooh ! You've really done an impressive work there. You seem to have
> decoded the most important parts of the protocol. I'll have to get an USB
> sniffer to do the job (wireshark does not seem to be able to directly
> capture USB traffic on Windows...)

I'm running Windows in VirtualBox and use wireshark (for wlan sniffing to the 
MFP) in Linux (since the traffic of the virtualized Windows will be run 
through the Linux network/usb drivers, too, of course). Under Linux, load the 
usbmon kernel module and you can use wireshark to also sniff USB traffic...

Alternatively, there are USB Snoopy and sniffusb for Windows.

> Well, you can find a tutorial in the sane-project Web pages which seems to
> make things pretty straightforward...

Actually, now. The backend-writing.txt file mainly talks about the directory 
structure and the coding style. The important backend.c file is only 
documented as "usually contains the SANE API code", but without any further 
mention what exactly needs to be coded and what the API is exactly, and how 
USB/network connections are to be detected/handled.

Cheers,
Reinhold

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, reinhold at kainhofer.com, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial & Actuarial Math., Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria
 * http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/, DVR: 0005886
 * LilyPond, Music typesetting, http://www.lilypond.org