[sane-devel] Debug Unsupported Scanner?

[jerry]

Hello all,

     Trying to get going with my periodic Giant Wallet Fluff Elimination 
Project ( GWFEP ).  I do have a big networked scanner with an ADF, but 
for wallet fluff, I much prefer a little sheet fed scanner.  Sit on the 
floor with the scanner and the pile of wallet fluff, shove little 
receipts etc through the scanner into the "done" pile.  Then take the 
whole pile and vacuum pack it into a baggie for long-term storage.  Or 
even shred it.

     My old Visioneer Strobe XP 100 is alas no longer functional, 
because I no longer have a Windows XP system.  They changed chipsets on 
the last version - supported by the "genesys" driver.

    I bought a later version on Ebay, but yesterday the postman arrived 
with it and said "You owe us $22.77 of postage".  I didn't pay it, and 
he took it back to the post office.  Sadly disappointed, just for yuks I 
stuck my old unsupported scanner onto my Ubuntu system.  Wonder of 
wonders, I actually got it to scan.  Twice.  But it's not reliable.

   sane-find-scanner intimates that it uses a LM9832 chip.  There is 
support for such in the Plustek driver, and I added a line
[usb] 0x04a7 0x0427 to plustek.conf.

   The thing is not stable at all.  Lots of I/O errors, lots of freezes, 
lots of plugging and unplugging the scanner from the USB.  Every time I 
do so, the minor number of the USB device increments, and I have to 
change the scanimage invocation.

   Is troubleshooting this thing worthwhile?  How would one do it?  I am 
an experienced C/assembler embedded systems developer - did that for a 
living for 20 years.  So I know how to use gdb etc.  Can the USB be 
snooped?  It behaves like something is not being initialized - and 
depending on the garbage therein, it either works or it doesn't.

   I suspect that the chipset/scanner is not stable in and of itself.  
It was not totally reliable under windows XP.  And Visioneer surely had 
some reason for changing chipsets on their version 3.  Changing chipsets 
costs money.

   Still, an awful lot of stuff does work.  And while the scanner was 
not completely stable under XP, it was stable enough to get real work 
done :).

                - Jerry Kaidor