[sane-devel] Interactive use of scanner buttons

[Andy Bennett]

Hi,

>   So, for scanning books, it would be nice to be able to control such a
> frontend as XSane with the scanner's hardware buttons. Because most of
> the time you can reach the hardware button even if you handle the book
> using both hands (however, a configurable delay after the button is
> pressed may be helpful option).
> 
>   (The other possible way to solve the described problem is to use a
> separate triggering device. May be a pedal! But that's another 
> story...)
> 
>   I want to know/discuss, what a design of a button monitor for
> use with interactive frontends would fit into SANE better. Any ideas?

I had a similar but slightly different set of requirements a few years 
ago.
I have an ix500 that has a sheet feeder and a hopper and I wanted to be 
able to load up the hopper and then press the button to start the scan.

I wrote some patches for scanimage that allowed it to "trigger" on one 
of the "buttons": it turned out that the hopper load event was exposed 
as a button push as was the actual hard-button on the scanner itself.

I submitted them to the list a couple of times but they never got any 
interest. I've been using them ever since tho' so I'd be happy to 
re-share them for comment and improvements.

The patch itself is quite simple. It adds command line options to 
scanimage
that allowed me to write a bash script that calls it in a loop where it 
would wait for a hopper load event then pop up a dialog for tags whilst 
waiting for the button push event. Then it would do the scanning and 
show the preview before going back to wait for the next hopper load 
event.


-- 
andyjpb at ashurst.eu.org
http://www.ashurst.eu.org/
http://www.gonumber.com/andyjpb
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