[sane-devel] Oddball Epson configuration

[Mike Wirth]

Folks,

Sorry to bother you, but I seem to be tangled up in my underwear :-) on a
scanner issue.  So I thought I would check among the experts here...

Happened to find an Epson "Multi Photo Feeder", Model EU-91, at a local
surplus electronics store at a price I couldn't pass up (Hey, I can always
tear it apart and use the stepper motor, etc. :-)  Thought it would be very
useful for scanning the few hundred (thousand) photos and biz cards I have
in shoeboxes around here.  Problem is, it's an attachment to certain Epson
scanner models (e.g., 2480?) that I don't have.

However, I do have an old Epson Perfection 1670 which has the same DIN
accessory connector (for a backlight for film scanning in this case) which
just "might" be hardware compatible.  So I embarked on a sequence of
experiments to get the base scanner running again and working my way up to
attaching the feeder.

Didn't get very far.  Tried at least three host computers and never got the
scanner running with the "official" Epson downloads (which doesn't seem to
be out of character for them).  Here's a quick synopsis:

   - MacBook Pro, OSX 10.8.2, Epson D/L is some version of an ICA scanner
   driver, which can only be obtained (and automatically installed) by App
   Store.  Scanner powers up "green" (with the USB cable disconnected), and is
   properly detected on the USB bus when connected (as shown by the System
   Report), with correct Manuf. and Device codes.  So far, so good.  But when
   I try to use the new Mac "Image Capture" utility, it lists the scanner as
   an attached "capture" device, but then crashes.  Stack backtrace looks like
   it was trying to do a read on the device.  Note: there is no Epson Scan app
   anymore.)
   - Did an install of the Epson driver and scan app on a Win XP laptop.
    Install goes OK, but the scan app dies on startup, complaining that it
   can't talk to the scanner.
   - Did an install (different version, of course) of the Epson software on
   a Win 7 64-bit system. When I try to start the Epson Scan app (v. 3.04 or
   similar), it dies immediately.
   - In all these cases, the scanner is left with red light blinking.

I suspected that the scanner hardware is either toast or it needs a
firmware update.  Started going through the ScanSnap firmware update
procedures in the SANE docs (hey, finally a SANE connection :-) Rebooted
the Win XP laptop into Ubuntu where I had a SANE installation.
 Sane-find-scanner and scanimage both found and identified the scanner OK.
 Didn't get to the point of trying to manually load the firmware.

So here are some questions:
1. Is my premise about the scanner needing a firmware reload plausible?
2. On the Mac (where I'll probably do the firmware upload) I got the
agfafirm Perl script running.  But how do I find the "/dev/..." location
for the scanner (to use as input to the script)?
3. Anybody have any experience with this particular "document"/photo feeder
from Epson?
4. Other than a tedious review of the docs and SANE parameters for the
Perfection 1670 and the 2480 :-) is there a better way to assess whether I
can get this feeder to work with this scanner?

Thanks for any hints that might lead me in the right direction (including
giving up on this project as a lost cause :-)

Mike
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