[sane-devel] Avision Status

[Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi Mike,

On Jan 29, 2011, at 1:07 PM, Mike Kelly wrote:

> For the sake of future Avision users scanning the mail archive, I'm going to
> list the remaining known issues with the backend.  I've only recently taken
> over maintenance of the backend, so this list may not be complete:

I have some information regarding Avision scanners which you might be interested in.

Around 12 years ago I bought a Canon CanoScan FB-310 flatbed scanner with parallel
connection (pass-through) for my Windows 98 machine back then. Since I was already
using Linux back then, I wanted to get that scanner working with SANE, unfortunately
to find out that it is not supported.

Since I already had (little) programming experience, I wanted to write a SANE backend
for the scanner myself and decided to ask the manufacturer for documentation. I figured
out that the FB-310 (like the FB-610) is a rebadged Avision AV-260C scanner, so I got
into contact with Avision. After a few mails back and forth, they sent me, to my surprise,
the full source code of their Windows driver.

I never really made any progress in porting the assembly code to SANE (into C), but
I still have the full source available and Avision provided it to me to be able to
write a SANE backend, so I think it's ok to share it (besides the fact that I got that
source code around 10 years ago).

If anyone is interested, I can provide the full source of the Windows driver of the
Avision AV-260C scanner which also covers some NEC and the aforementioned
Canon scanners. Of course, it certainly also helps improving the Avision backend.

PS: The Avision AV-260C is a SCSI scanner which SANE has support for, while
        the Canon CanoScan FB-310/610 are both unsupported parallel port scanners.
        If I remember correctly, earlier versions of the Linux kernel provided a SCSI-Parallel
        port bridge which could help to get the Canon scanners work with the Avision
        backend. However, I never succeeded in that, but as I said, that has been long
        time ago and I was not really skilled back then. In any case, I think the
        SANE database should be updated to reflect the fact that the FB-310/610
        are actually Avision scanners and thus they should be assigned to that
        backend (and not canon_pp).

Regards,

Adrian