[sane-devel] Canon N70U (fwd)

[Theodore Kilgore]

I joined this mail list yesterday because of the problems indicated in the
message below. Due to inexperience with such lists and with funny
web-mail setups when I am so used to pine :(  I apparently did not succeed
in getting the message posted. Anyway, I would welcome contact and
constructive suggestions, couched, I hope, at my level. What's that? well,
I would characterize myself as a theoretical mathematician with a knack
for practical things, such as fixing the car, and a longtime, serious
Linux user, installer, and maintainer (part of my job at this point),
hardware hacker, but definitely not a programmer.

So, anyone else out there want to work with the Canoscan N670U?

Then read on. You will see pretty soon what I know and what I don't know,
from the message below.

Theodore Kilgore

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 21:58:45 -0600
From: kilgota@khayyam.math.auburn.edu
Reply-To: kilgota@banach.math.auburn.edu
To: g.jaeger@earthling.net
Subject: Canon N70U

Dear Mr. Jaeger,

I am very interested to learn that you are also one of those
unfortunates with a Canon N670U. I was given one of them for Christmas
by a relative who should have known better. He is a computer engineer,
but he thinks perhaps too much of my abilities in Linux. Anyway:

I have been working on supporting this thing, too, without really
understanding anything very deep of what I am doing  (I have to keep
stressing this so you don't decide all of a sudden later on that I am
actually ignorant as hell).

I have another box for testing purposes, which dual-boots Linux and the
competition's '98 model.  I have installed the sniffer and collected a
couple of logs. One of them after bz2-ing will even fit onto a floppy!

I have also tried out (blindly, of course) to adapt a driver for an
existing machine to run. I started with V. Dergachev's driver for the
Canon 1220U. With a couple of "cheat" modifications, that will pretend
(but only pretend, alas) to scan and will exit successfully after the
"completion."

Also by guessing I have tried out the plustek driver, too, because it
seemed close. I only get an I/O error message.

Therefore, a couple of questions:

1. How does anyone know this thing has a LM9833  in it? And what is this
other chip you folks are talking about? Or is CIS another type of
interface arrangement and not another chip? So, seriously, how did
anyone discover this, or is it just guesswork?

2. Don't expect much positive information from me, but I will be glad to
help out by testing things. Just send them. And please share some of
your clever ideas with the old math professor in Alabama.  I want my
scanner to work, too.


Theodore Kilgore