[sane-devel] mustek 600 usb scanner back-end

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Sun, Sep 23, 2001 at 07:26:42PM +0300, Marcus Alanen wrote:
> Hi! I've just got a Mustek 600 USB scanner, but there seems to be no
> backend. I was thinking of writing it, but first I thought of asking
> this list:

See http://www.meier-geinitz.de/sane/ . The other USB scanners (600
CU, 1200 CU, 1200 CU Plus, 1200 UB) are supported, however the 600 USB
isn't until now. I'm currently working on the 1200 USB and after that
trying to get the 600 USB working. The problem with the 600 USB is that
is uses a different chip, the Mustek 1015 and not the 1017 as all the
others. So I don't know yet, how long it will take.

> - How easy/hard is this to do? I have no technical documentation about
> the scanner, and neither do I know anything about scanners in general.
> Or USB, for that matter. I would however claim to be a good
> programmer.

Without technical documentation: Months or even years :-). However, I
have the Windows source code so it can be done. It will take time
nevertheless.

> - How are Mustek scanners in general? Can I use the USB part from some
> other scanner and otherwise use backend/mustek* routines?

No. But in this case the mustek_usb backend can be used, at least if
the 1015 is not too different.

> - According to the manual page, "USB scanners are not supported
> by this backend by now". Why?

The manual page of the mustek backend? This backend will never support
USB scanners because they are completely different from the SCSI
scanners. Apart from the SANE API and some helper functions everything
is different in the backend.

Bye,
  Henning