[sane-devel] Epson Perfection 2480 Photo: firmware loading

[Julien BLACHE]

Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf at member.fsf.org> wrote:

>> Maybe Olaf could help here ?
>
> Not much as I'm bound by a NDA :-(

Well, at least you can confirm the uneducated guess ;)

> That not withstanding, the snapscan backend sources show that a fair
> bit of the structure of the INQUIRY command's reply is already known.
> This is the command I would expect to show different replies for both
> models.

So it should be pretty easy to just compare both replies and sort out
the differences.

> USB vendor ID, product ID and descriptions being identical, that is
> just about the only option left.  I'd expect this kind of info in the
> reply to an INQUIRY.

Good - wish I had a 2580 at hand to sort that out.

>> While speaking of the 2480, I used it with the epkowa backend
>> (requires evil non-free binary-only libraries), and did not have to
>> suffer the waiting time after the firmware loading. Would it be
>> possible to do something similar in the snapscan backend ?
>
> It also requires an evil non-free firmware file.

Yes... but well, I don't really have a choice for that part of the
evil non-free proprietary binary things ;)

> The backend checks (via that evil binary-only library :-() with the
> hardware if a download is necessary and only downloads if necessary.

The snapscan backend does the same :)

> If you power-cycle your scanner, you'll find that it will take some
> time even with the epkowa backend before you can use the scanner.

Hmm. Maybe the backend just handles that differently then.

>> (something like a SANE daemon to automatically load firmwares into
>> scanners which need it, triggered by hotplug, would be a really nice
>> thing to have... shouldn't be too hard to do, but requires a snippet
>> of code for the firmware loading for each and every scanner...)
>
> I've been thinking about something like this for iscan and discussed
> it to some extent with Johannes Meixner from SUSE.  The model/vendor
> specific snippet for the download is a bottle neck, but otherwise we
> agreed that using hotplug (or similar) to trigger a firmware download
> was a good idea.

Maybe we should just start coding :)

JB.

-- 
Julien BLACHE                                   <http://www.jblache.org> 
<jb at jblache.org>                                  GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169