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My friends can never understand my excitement when I realize that I can use a non-trivial scanner or printer utility in Linux. For example, I was really impress
by tapia 6y ago
My friends can never understand my excitement when I realize that I can use a non-trivial scanner or printer utility in Linux. For example, I was really impressed that I could scan without problems from my brother ADS-1100W through wifi(!), or when I could configure the printer at work that requires some login credentials. Ah, the little joys of life :P
- tialaramex 6y agoIt's actually interesting which things get standardized and which do not, which directly impacts what works and what doesn't if you use a less than majority system. USB's expectation that you can just plug things in and they work really helped drive standardization of many things. This was done using USB's "Device class" model, but we'd seen a similar model in PCI without overwhelming success (e.g. SATA is a PCI class, but so is VGA card - knowing my high end graphics card is technically "VGA compatible" is not actually helpful). In USB things turned out somewhat differently. Webcams for example had previously been completely proprietary but USB led to UVC and today you expect to just plug in a borrowed webcam and use it - drivers? Why would it need special drivers, it's a webcam. USB Sound is the same, you aren't surprised when plugging a USB headset in not only makes the headset work, but also re-routes audio to it by default. Again there's a standard (the standard is completely bonkers but it's a standard) But somehow scanners escaped this. USB scanners are each different, driver code has to be written to address each family of scanners from each vendor. Vendors might choose to send data in a different order, or to cut up the scanning procedure differently. One scanner has an explicit command to move the scan head back to its rest position another always does it when scanning ends. One sends interleaved image data, another separates sensor channels out. SANE bundles a bunch of the resulting drivers for the Free Unix systems, but it's worth a moment to consider how this even became necessary. Who wanted scanners to be arbitrarily different? Who benefits? Maybe you can make some sort of vague argument in favour of opportunity to innovate, but scanners hardly seem like a more thrusting forward-looking and innovative technology than, say, webcams and those are standardized.
- non-entity 6y agoTo be fair I get excited when printing /scanning through wifi works on any OS.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y agoNevermind WiFi. I get excited when the ink cartridge hasn't dried up/run out after 20 odd pages.
- stareatgoats 6y agob/w laser printers ftw
- tapia 6y agoActually, yes. It is really a pretty cool thing in general haha
- denysvitali 6y agoThen I guess my little project might be helpful to you too: https://github.com/denysvitali/brother-scanner-scripts https://github.com/denysvitali/brother-scanner-scripts
- tapia 6y agoThanks for sharing. Maybe you could add a more detailed Readme? What is the exact use situation of the script?
- denysvitali 6y agoSorry for not expalining it better. This is basically a reverse engineering of Windows' (SOAP?) Scan API that was used to perform the scan over LAN. Unfortunately my Linux distribution did not support the scanner, so I looked at the requests made by my Windows VM, and I've created this small set of bash scripts to perform the scanning :)
- imglorp 6y agoI have that scanner and love it. The firmware is clunky junk from 15 years ago, but its killer feature is scan to FTP. The workflow: insert document, press a button, and go look at PDFs in the NAS folder. No dinking with Sane like poor OP.