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

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Julien BLACHE <jb at jblache.org> writes:

> Oliver Schwartz <Oliver.Schwartz at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>> I've reduced the size for the 2480 since I currently can't distinguish 
>> between 2480 and 2580. The original size may cause damages on a 2580 
>> since the scanner bumps into the rear end of the transparency unit.
>
> Maybe Olaf could help here ?

Not much as I'm bound by a NDA :-(

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.

> As the TPU is the only difference between the two models, that would
> be a mean of identifying them, at least if it is possible to determine
> which option is installed on the scanner.

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.

> 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.

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

> (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.
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen
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