[sane-devel] Epson Perfection 1670 -- a hardware or software issue?

[Mike Wirth]

Folks,

I have an Epson Perfection 1670 scanner that I'm trying to resurrect.
 Could run it on a WinXP machine or a MacBook Pro, but all efforts to use
it have failed.  Symptoms common to all HW/SW combinations are:

   - On power up, USB disconnected, machine makes some noise, light (in
   middle of scan button) blinks and turns on steady green.
   - When USB is connected, light turns red, then blinks red.
   - Machine shows up on USB device scans with correct manufacturer and
   device IDs.

Here's what's seen from various SW, including SANE (where I've followed
various instructions on the net to put the esfw30.bin firmware file in the
appropriate place and make corresponding changes to the epson and scansnap
(tried both) conf files:

   - MacBook Pro, running latest OS X 10.8.2, downloaded ICA driver from
   Epson via Apple's App Store update mechanism.  Result is that plugging in
   the scanner USB causes Apple's Image Capture utility to start up with
   "Perfection 1670" available as a device.  But attempting to scan causes
   Image Capture to crash with a backtrace showing that it was trying to read
   a block of data from the scanner.
   - Other scanner SW on the MacBook Pro (e.g., VueScan) see the scanner,
   but fail to be able to do anything with it (e.g., go into permanent wait
   for lamp to warm up, 0 thru 100%, then repeat).
   - SANE on MacBook Pro can see the scanner (e.g., with sane-find-scanner
   and scanimage -L) but scanimage fails.
   - Tests on a WinXP machine produce similar results.

A prudent person would guess that the hardware is faulty, but I thought I
would ask here before giving up.  Any ideas?  Is there a more primitive
diagnostic I can try?  A way to force load the firmware? (BTW, does the
firmware need to be reloaded with every scanner power-up or is it stored in
Flash?)

TIA,

Mike (who wants to get an automatic photo feeder working with this scanner
-- once he gets the basic unit running :-)

PS: I have electronic skills and tools.  A useful reply might be "Hang a
scope on xxx....."
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