[sane-devel] Kofax CGA Board

[Ralph Little]

Hi,
Sounds like this might be up your street. I send the link to you just on 
the off-chance that you are interested.

https://vancouver.craigslist.org/van/ele/d/vancouver-agfa-arcus-1200-flatbed/7568501939.html

Cheers,
Ralph

On 2022-12-30 02:11, luja wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> good scanners are heavy, so everything lighter than 20kG is nor worth 
> using :-)
> So I am experimenting with old ex-expensive production scanners that 
> process at least 80 image per minute. Such as fujitsu fi-5900c or 
> kodak i810 (the dinosaur).
> As the fi-5900c is quite small you can have it in your room not in a 
> storage house. If you connect it using usb you find it beeing slowed 
> down by slow usb.
> Also the native scsi interface is nice but KOFAX CGA is nicer.
> Here is a very expensive offer at ebay for reference. Hint, the 
> interface comes with the scanner, as it was purchased at that time 
> with the priceless scanner for a "priceless" price :-)
> https://web.archive.org/web/20221230094606/https://www.ebay.com/itm/183424759527
>
> Please look at the picture of that ebay offer:
> https://web.archive.org/web/20221230094608/https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Om8AAOSwd6pblVeN/s-l1600.jpg
> https://web.archive.org/web/20221230095152/https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/StgAAOSw01JblVeQ/s-l1600.jpg
>
> So you can see SDRAM module, a freescale coldfire CPU (68K+, maybe 
> running some sort of RTOS), and 2 xilinx spartan fpa, which was quit 
> good at that time.
>
> KOFAX VRS 4.5 was shipped with fujitsu scanners and there is a copy at 
> archive.org.
> https://archive.org/details/vrs-4.50.7z
> Also the newer KOFAX VRS 5.1.0 is shipped for them, you can find it on 
> the KOFAX page.
>
> So why I am posting this?
>
> There are also other production scanners which use the KOFAX interface 
> and software companies tend to be "lazy", so the VRS SCSI and VRS USB 
> should (!) be similar for all KOFAX CGM interfaces.
> The KOFAX VRS tool provides some "advanced" image processing features 
> like descewing, noise removal, gamma correction and so on and offloads 
> some of it to the CGM board which sits in the scaner.
>
> So I suggest to use KOFAX VRS, there is also an unlimited trial 
> version that stamps the images, with a virtualization environment and 
> to sniff the SCSI /dev/sg0 traffic or the USB traffic using the Linux 
> that runs the Windows Vista-VM :-) with KOFAX.
> https://www.kofax.com/products/vrs-elite/trial
> after entering some credentials you get this link.
> https://az32125.vo.msecnd.net/download/Download$/VRS/KofaxVRS-5.2.0.ZIP
> also archive.org has it :-)
>
> Depending on the findings we could use ALL Kodak CGA based production 
> scanners with sane and use some CGA features like noise reduction or 
> deskewing.
>
> As I found by reading manuals, the VRS tool gets always greyscale or 
> color imaes from the CGA interface and does the halftone stuff in 
> their software running with windows.
>
> I would like to opt to use some of the most interesting features of 
> the CGA board to quickly extract the pictures from the scanners, as we 
> have modern computers today and tons of open source image processing 
> like unpaper that we do not need the VRS tool.
>
> We need to talk to the interface, and to learn how it works.
>
> Who wants to join the efforts?
>
> cheers
>
> luja
>
>