[sane-devel] Brother MFP

[Ralph Little]

Hi All,
Just a heads-up that I have started development of a Brother MFP backend 
for all MFC and DPC models.
Brother have some drivers for their machines and, for the most part, 
they are pretty good, but we do sometimes get requests for help about 
some of their older packages that will not install due to distro 
compatibility issues.

Well the protocol is fairly straightforward and, apart from variations 
in scan data format, seems to be pretty consistent across models. So 
here we are.

https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/-/merge_requests/751

The name that I have given to the backend is provisionally 
"brother_mfp". This is to try to avoid device naming clashes with 
Brother's proprietary drivers.

There is a basic prototype and the code should be taken as a "proof of 
concept", so *very* pre-alpha. It supports some types of scanning on a 
single model, USB only.
If anyone is tempted to try it out, then please feel free, but be aware 
that it is still a bit buggy.

The single supported model is an MFC-4320DW, which is supported by 
Brother's "brother4" backend, from their brscan4 package.
I also have an MFC-465CN which is quite an early machine, supported by 
the "brother2" backend from their brscan2 package.
I suspect that the models supported by each of these backends are 
probably very similar in terms of protocol support.

The next step is to refactor to allow different scan data formats, 
adding JPEG decoding for colour scanning and start to look at network 
scanning.
I will also start to organise the code so that models can be assigned to 
protocol families for easy configuration.

Once I have something a little more concrete. I will be looking for help 
getting hold of traces for other models. There are a lot Brother 
machines out there.

Cheers,
Ralph