[sane-devel] Multiple Scanner Support

[Joel Penner]

Thanks. Here I'm using a CanoScan 5600F (the Mac driver of which is kind of
unstable, and the shipped program horribly bloated!,) an Epson Perfection
V33 (a bad scanner!,) and a CanoScan 3200 (which I'm using with VueScan,
it's proven to be very stable.) At home I have another CS 5600F, two CS LiDE
20s, a CS 5000, an Agfa Snapscan e20 and e50, and a really good Epson
scanner, the name of which I forget. I could VNC the computer to find out,
but I'm on my cell phone data connection right now...

The issue of resource hogging isn't common. So far I've only starkly
experienced it with the CS 5600Fs. It's unfortunate that such an amazing
scanner has to have such a shoddy Mac backend/driver. Hopefully the eventual
SANE backend will be better!

Similar to your idea, initially I tried running multiple instances of
VueScan, but because the specific scanners weren't specified to each
instance, they presumably conflicted, causing the different instances
to occasionally crash. How would one give explicit device names to each
copy? I am very comfortable with OS GUIs, but unfortunately have done almost
no programming.

- Joel

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 2:05 AM, m. allan noah <kitno455 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Neat videos!
>
> The answer to your question depends on the scanner, and the driver (we
> call them backends).
>
> 1. Some scanners are really dumb and require the host software to do
> lots of processing to get a usable image. You could certainly stagger
> the scans so that two scanners were never in use at the same time.
>
> 2. Some backends are written to only talk to one scanner, and may not
> play well if two scanners are open from within the same application.
> It might be possible to avoid this by running multiple copies of the
> app, and giving explicit device names to each copy.
>
> What scanners are you using now?
>
> allan
>
> On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 7:53 PM, Joel Penner <featheredtar at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi. I'm currently using multiple scanners for a project where I have
> flowers
> > scanned a few times an hour to make videos of the desiccation process.
> I'm
> > currently in Germany where I've managed to get three scanners running off
> of
> > one iBook, but at home I have eight scanners strewn across multiple old
> > computers. My original idea was to have all the scanners running off of
> one
> > computer, but issues with drivers conflicting with each other in addition
> to
> > poorly programmed drivers which use over half of the CPU's resources
> while
> > scanning presented problems. I've been using the included software
> packages
> > where possible, and VueScan when not. I've experimented a bit with SANE.
> I
> > was wondering what people thought about the possibility of running
> multiple
> > scanners off of one computer. Does SANE support this? And I've been using
> > solely PPC Macs running either 10.4 or 10.5 so far.
> > You can find some videos of my project here:
> >
> > http://www.flickr.com/photos/featheredtar/sets/72157611634807864/
> > Thanks,
> > Joel
> > --
> > sane-devel mailing list: sane-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org
> > http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sane-devel
> > Unsubscribe: Send mail with subject "unsubscribe your_password"
> >             to sane-devel-request at lists.alioth.debian.org
> >
>
>
>
> --
> "The truth is an offense, but not a sin"
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/attachments/20110714/0d07d30f/attachment-0001.html>