[sane-devel] Announcing AirSane, an Apple AirScan compatible server frontend

[Jürgen Mellinger]

AirSane is a SANE WebScan frontend that supports Apple's AirScan protocol, allowing Apple iphone and Macintosh devices to scan from SANE scanners, using Apple provided software components on the client side only.

Scanners are detected automatically, and published through mDNS. Though images may be acquired and transferred in JPEG, PNG, and PDF/raster format through a simple web interface, AirSane's intended purpose is to be used with AirScan/eSCL clients such as Apple's Image Capture.

Images are encoded on-the-fly during acquisition, keeping memory/storage demands low. Thus, AirSane will run fine on a Raspberry Pi or similar device.

AirSane has been developed by reverse-engineering the communication protocol implemented in Apple's AirScanScanner client (macos 10.12.6, /System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/AirScanScanner.app).

Authentication and secure communication are not supported.

Source code for AirScan, with build instructions for Linux, is available at https://github.com/SimulPiscator/AirSane.git.

Regards,
Jürgen Mellinger