[sane-devel] Scanner Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB 1200 PRO

[Will]

Dear all,

I never really succeed to use this scanner when I purchased it some 
years ago, but I wanted to give it a last try. Please don't suggest to 
use it in a windows VM, it brings me out in hives.

$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 027: ID 055f:040b Mustek Systems, Inc. ScanExpress A3 USB 
1200 PRO

It seems different from the Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB (usb 0x055f 
0x0210) supported by the gt86xx backend. I suspect it is only USB1.0. I 
tried to override it with my modelid, created a dir 
/usr/share/sane/gt86xx, added the firmware a32fw.usb, but it fails when 
I try scanimage (a32fw.usb, error message : open of device gt68xx 
[vendor & dev id] failed Invalid argument).

Then I got another idea, as other posts suggest that my scanner I 
related to Mustek BearPaw 2448 TA Pro USB. As the mustek_usb2 backend 
that supports it is beta (since 2008...), there is no config file in 
/etc/sane.d for it. So I cloned the backends repo, changed the deviceid 
to mine (0409 -> 040b), recompiled with ./configure 
BACKENDS="muskted_usb2" and replaced 
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/sane/libsane-mustek_usb2.so.1.0.31 with the 
recompiled binary.

When I plug the scanner, scanimage -L detects it as the BearPaw scanner. 
I just had a black image at output and bad noises (that might break my 
scanner, so I tried it only once). I guess I don't have the previous 
error because it is the same chipset (not indicated by sane-find-scanner 
nor scanimage -L), but all commands to the scanner must be bad as they 
are different devices.

My programming skills are far away from programming an extension of such 
a driver. Is there anyone out there that would be able to do this, or if 
I should definitively give up on this ?

$ uname -r

Linux [hostname] 5.9.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.9.11-1 (2020-11-27) 
x86_64 GNU/Linux

Related posts :

http://sane.10972.n7.nabble.com/Mustek-ScanExpress-A3-USB-1200-PRO-td8044.html

https://sane-devel.alioth.debian.narkive.com/I2GUPzAp/mustek-scanexpress-a3-usb-1200-pro

Best regards,
Will