[sane-devel] Rising project : Support of Konica-Minolta Magicolor 2480MF

[Jean-Marc CHALLIER]

> Hello Jean-Marc, 

Hello Reinhold

First - thank you very much for your swift answer :)

> Now, that's a coincidence. Just a few days ago I posted a similar question to the list about the magicolor 1690MF... Unfortunately, I did not get any response. 

Well, I must admit that I only searched for 2480MF, not for other devices, given the fact that this seems to be is very specific, even among the Magicolor series. First of all, it is USB-only, and if you do a "man foo2lava", you'll see the following : 
> [...]
> −z model 
>    Model. The default is [0].
>
>    model  protocol  Description 
>    0      LAVAFLOW  magicolor 2490 MF 
>    0      LAVAFLOW  magicolor 2530 DL 
>    1      OPL       magicolor 2480 MF 
>    2      LAVAFLOW  magicolor 1600W 
>    2      LAVAFLOW  magicolor 1680MF 
>    2      LAVAFLOW  magicolor 1690MF 
> [...]
..which means that the protocol is not the same as others. If I can't find any documentation, I'll take a look, at least, to the printer driver in order to understand a bit more about this 'OPL' protocol.
 
> Please note, though, that I'm not a sane developer, but I'm looking into writing a backend. 

Just the same for me...

> To be honest, I haven't yet thought about this, but I would suspect that the other devices don't respond while one is doing some work, or an error code is returned. 

I'm sure someone on this list has already coped with an MFP - if I don't get any answer, I'll post a more specific question on this list.

> I tried sending a request to the konica minolta support, but got absolutely no response.

That was the worst possible answer, and I must say that I expected it... Well, I'll try to ring their French office in France, in case an "open-software minded someone" answers the phone and is ready to help...

> I did some reverse-engineering, and it doesn't seem so hard. It would be interesting to see whether the 2480mf uses the same protocol (and if so, what are the differences). 
> Here are the results of my reverse-engineering so far: http://wiki.kainhofer.com/hardware/magicolor_scan 

Waooh ! You've really done an impressive work there. You seem to have decoded the most important parts of the protocol. I'll have to get an USB sniffer to do the job (wireshark does not seem to be able to directly capture USB traffic on Windows...)

> I can't help you much with programming, since I don't know the sane codebase yet,

Well, you can find a tutorial in the sane-project Web pages which seems to make things pretty straightforward...

> but at least the data protocol looks like it might be decoded. 

Hope it's gonna be the case with the 2480MF also.
I'll keep you (and the list) informed of my progress...

> Cheers, 

Cheers,

> Reinhold 

Jean-Marc