[sane-devel] Reverse engeneering of a network attached scanner?

[m. allan noah]

Well, that's interesting, some sort of plain text ini file in addition
to the image data. Should be possible for someone to write a program
to talk to it, though you might have to make a bunch of scans with
various options changed in the windows driver, so you can identify all
the commands.

allan

On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Jörg Knochen <joerg at jcbone.de> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I just bundled up a package containing the wireshark file, the resulting tif and a screen capture of the scanning process including the scan interface, wiresharks window and video of a webcam which shows the behaviour of the scanner in sync with the rest. I think it might be easier to work out the meaning of the data stream in conjunction with the video.
>
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/oyfmmxcbi6qz55s/vistascan_package_140626.zip
>
> What we can see:
>
> • at frame 100 the scan is initiated in the imaging software
> • at frame 135 the driver checks for the scanner
> • at frame 220 the twain scan interface is open, the scanner starts its spindle
> • at frame 413 the scanner opens its access door
> • at frame 473 the access door recognises the plate and closes, pinching the plate
> • at frame 500 the image plate is inserted (with quite some force, since it’s pinched in by the door)
> • at frame 524 the scanner recognises the plate, starts pulling it in and switches on the erasing light (the plates can be reused, after being erased by photons)
> • at frame 690 the fist usable data is coming in (look at the Twain GUI)
> • at frame 1003 scanning stops, but the scanner has to pull the whole plate through it’s mechanism. Plates can have different sizes…
> • at frame 1363 the plate drops out of the scanner
> • at frame 1403 the light is turned off and the access door opens up again
> • at frame 1559 the twain GUI is closed. the access door gets shut and the spindle gets turned off
>
> you can see the inner workings of the scanner here:
> http://www.duerrdental.com/en/products/imaging/vistascan-image-plate-scanner/vistascan-mini-plus/?changeLang=1
>
> If there are any questions left…
>
> Jörg
>
>
> On 25 Jun 2014, at 20:58, M. Allan Noah <kitno455 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The simplest, uncompressed bitmap.
>>
>> allan
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Jun 25, 2014, at 2:17 PM, Jörg Knochen <joerg at jcbone.de> wrote:
>>
>>> Great!
>>>
>>> So now I have to look into wireshark. As far as I can see, it writes a lot of different file formats. Which one would be preferable?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Jörg
>>>
>>>
>>> On 25 Jun 2014, at 14:32, m. allan noah <kitno455 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> This looks like a fun project! The complexity of a driver is often
>>>> inversely proportional to the cost of the scanner. Since this is not a
>>>> commodity machine, I'm not sure that rule applies. Take a wireshark
>>>> dump of the smallest scan possible, and put it up on the web
>>>> somewhere.
>>>>
>>>> allan
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 3:56 AM, Jörg Knochen <joerg at jcbone.de> wrote:
>>>>> Hi!
>>>>>
>>>>> I’m the administrator of a small dentists office. The IT is Macintosh based, with a FreeNAS Server, with one exeption: the workstation used for XRay operation has to run windows because of ONE missing twain driver for OS X.
>>>>>
>>>>> The scanner is the following model:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.duerrdental.com/en/products/imaging/vistascan-image-plate-scanner/vistascan-mini-plus/?changeLang=1
>>>>>
>>>>> It can be attached by USB, but in our case it uses a network connection over IP.
>>>>>
>>>>> If i could sniff this network connection and record the communication between the twain driver and the scanner - is there anyone out there willing to help me write a sane driver? The manufacturer has no interest so far in supporting anything but windows.
>>>>>
>>>>> Another Idea: wouldn’t it be possible to install the original Twain driver into a wine bottle and write a sane driver which can pass through the twain commands from the bottle to a native interface on the unix side? This would be a GREAT workaround, too.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for your time,
>>>>> Jörg-Ch. Knochen
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> 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"