Re: Umax Astra 1220P Scanner
On Wed, 30 Dec 1998, Trevor Barrie wrote:
> Does anybody know how I'd go about using a UMAX Astra 1220P under Debian?
> I installed sane, but looking at the docs it seems as though the only
> Umax scanners it supports are SCSI models; this is a parallel port scanner.
>
I have the Mustek 9636P and have the same problem. We need to
obtain/decode/hack (?) the protocol used for communication between the
parallel port and the scanner to write the driver. Unfortunately the
Mustek dosn't seem to be interested in releasing the protocol's
specification (may be they are afraid, that someone will copy their genial
solutions or maybe they are ashamed of it :-) ...), I'm afraid Umax
will not release their protocol either.
Unfortunately the Mustek's driver doesn't work with wine (it is VxD
based), so I'm unable to investigate the protocol with the software tools.
The only solution is to hack the protocol with the parallel port
sniffer (or logic state analyser). The driver for my scanner works not
only in EPP, but also in SPP nibble mode, so sniffing of the parallel port
should be easy (however it requires a relativey simple additional
hardware).
Unfortunately I'm just finishing my PhD thesis, so at the moment I have no
time for this project...
Wojtek Zabolotny
wzab@ipe.pw.edu.pl
PS. BTW I would like to know how the SCSI drivers for scanners were
written. Did the scanner vendors release their SCSI protocols, or they
were just easier to hack?
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