[sane-devel] yet another 5400c sucker

[Bertrik Sikken]

Joacim Persson wrote:

>Hi. I just subscribed to this list, after realising I should have bought
>myself an Epson instead. ;)
>
>I use Linux.
>
>So far I got my 5400c recognised on the USB, and by sane-find-scanner, but
>not yet by scanimage -L (won't actually work anyway, but it would be nice
>to at least see a sign of life ...or life in death)
>
>I cheated the scanner.o module though. Simply added it to the list in the
>code. I have no idea if this is a sane (hehe) way to do it.
>No luck with the hpusbscsi module, using the same hack. (poorly documented
>module, unfortunately. And I didn't explore it further after getting
>contact through scanner.o)
>
>I also had a look at the mailing list archives and downloaded the
>(test/alpha) hp3300c backend. Will have a go at it shortly.
>
There is absolutely no way that the HP5400 will work with a backend for
the HP3300c.

>
>A couple of questions:
>
>Is HP one of these companies which has a freeware-hostile policy, or can
>the protocol specs be downloaded from someplace?
>(how about the chipset vendor?)
>
In my experience, HP seems sympathetic to the cause but providing
Linux drivers or specs for writing a driver is very low on their
priority list.

I'm pretty sure that the 'niash' line of chips used in the
HP3300, HP3400, HP4300 and HP5400 are made by Silitek.
I have not tried to contact them about specs yet.

>Can the windows software that came with the scanner be used (with any
>success) under Wine?  (seems like one approach to reverse-engineer the
>protocol, apart from actually making use of the scanner for the moment,
>short of setting up a windows machine, which is bad for my nerves...)
>

I don't know, never tried that.

Bertrik