[sane-devel] Open sourced Brother DCP-1602 backend

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Guilherme,

guilherme.chehab at yahoo.com writes:

> Hey Guys,
> Are you aware of any work in progress to add open sourced support to
> Brother scanners?

No, not really but a quick search on "Brother scanner" over at GitHub
turned up a number of repositories.  An equally quick scan of those
hints at mostly wrappers around Brother's code.

> I have a Brother DCP-1602 multifuncional printer/scanner that I want
> be able to share using a raspberry Pi as a saned server.

I saw a Python [project for the DCP-1610][1].  Might be of interest.

 [1]: https://github.com/Equidamoid/dcp1610

> It is my understanding that currently Brother only has Linux support
> through its closed-source proprietary backend driver that it is
> distributed only with x86 binaries. Even if there had distributed some
> old versions of the source code on the net, I was not able compile
> them to a functional results -- it seems to be quite incomplete.

Last time I looked and IIRC, the source code that Brother puts out
basically starts a separate process using a binary-only executable
that is responsible for the device I/O.

# ISTR that their "source" code was even GPL'd ...

> So and I am willing to give a try in the writing of a portable open
> sourced backend for it -- or join an on going work.

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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