[sane-devel] Plustek Scanfx /w Proprietary ISA card

[Gerhard Jaeger]

Hi Fred,

On Friday 31 December 2004 22:29, Fred Stevens wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a Scanfx with an ISA adapter card.  The card is mapped to a
> jumper selectable range of addresses (0x220,230,260,270,320,330,360,370)
> and IRQ settings(3,4,5,10,11,12).  After looking at the card, I
> determined that it is similar to a parallel port with the exception that
> the data bus is bi-directional.  There are only a handful of LSttl chips
> (74LS245, 74LS244, 74LS86, 74LS74, 74LS174 and a 16?? pal) and one PAL
> on the board so it can't be doing too much.  The address range of the
> card is four bytes (I think) and they are mirrored in the next four
> bytes since address line A2 isn't connected on the card edge.  The A0
> and A1 lines are connected, as well as A3 through A9.  Nothing above
> that along with  ~iow and ~ior only being used from the ISA bus.  IRQs
> 3,4,5,10,11,12 are connected and are jumper selectable.  The connector
> attached to the cardis a high density 25 pin Dsub style.  In the scanner
> unit the LSI thatis connected to the interface (normal 25 Dsub on the
> scanner side) is a Plustek 92001.  I am going to do some more hardware
> debugging to see what the card does when I have some time.
>
> Is this information useful to anyone?  The scanner is a paperweight to
> me unless I can use it under Linux since I stay away from that other
> operating system for intel platforms.  Even so, the drivers available
> for Win95/98 aren't very good.  My dad gave me the unit when he was done
> using it under Win98 for that reason.  It's rather well made though and
> could be useful attached to my print server.

the description is more or less useless, because you need to know how this
ASIC works. I think its a predecessor of the 96001 ASIC, which is used in
later Plustek parallelport scanner and supported by the plustek_pp backend.
As this ASIC if pretty old, I don't have any technical documentation on that.

Ciao,
Gerhard