[sane-devel] Multiple Scanner Support

[m. allan noah]

Sane is very different from the GUI scanning you are used to. what you
want is as simple as this pseudocode:

while(1){
 scanimage -d"devicename1" > directory1/`date +%s`.pnm
 scanimage -d"devicename2" > directory2/`date +%s`.pnm
 scanimage -d"devicename3" > directory3/`date +%s`.pnm
 sleep(1200);
}

unfortunately, this only works if your scanners are supported. the
cs3200 and cs5600, not so much.

allan

On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 8:44 PM, Joel Penner <featheredtar at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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"
>
>



-- 
"The truth is an offense, but not a sin"