… your medical records folder is ten times thicker than the job contracts folder. I was cleaning up through the paperwork yesterday and today, and there are so many things.. Luckily I have most of my CT scans in digital format, beside the last one I did at the ER last week, and a cerebral CT from a few months ago. But the release paperwork I had only in printed form, which I needed to scan and “PDFize” on Tuesday to send to my GP — nice to have one who’s reachable via e-mail.
It’s the scanning that actually made me think a bit. I have the scanner a bit far from my workstation; to scan a five pages document I have to prepare the scanimage command in batch mode on the workstation, then walk all around my desk to get to the scanner, and then get my arm around the monitor to press the return key on the keyboard to start the scan.
The annoying thing is that the scanner has four buttons on it, that should be made just for the task of starting the scan. Unfortunately these buttons don’t work out of the box on Linux at all. There is a package, called scanbuttond that polls for them through libusb and then execute a custom script when they are pressed. But as you can guess, polling means it uses a lot of CPU, and the fact that they run a generic script makes it less integrable in a desktop environment. Of course it would be easy to port scanbuttond to submit the read buttons back into the kerel input subsystem so that they appear as generic events, but… I think this should be a task well suited for a kernel module, hooking them up directly in the input subsystem, so that evdev could pick them up and then a program could just wait for them as shortcuts to have some action.
I tried looking into writing something before, but I ended up stuck in a problem: would a kernel module interfacing with the scanner interfere with libusb access by sane itself? Last time I enquired Greg KH, he asked me to proivde lsusb -vv output but, sorry Greg, work piled up and I forgot about all of it (until yesterday when I had to scan some more documents). Well, if anybody wants to take a look, this is it for my current scanner:
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 04b8:0121 Seiko Epson Corp. Perfection 2480 Photo
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 2.00
bDeviceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class
bDeviceSubClass 255 Vendor Specific Subclass
bDeviceProtocol 255 Vendor Specific Protocol
bMaxPacketSize0 64
idVendor 0x04b8 Seiko Epson Corp.
idProduct 0x0121 Perfection 2480 Photo
bcdDevice 0.00
iManufacturer 1 EPSON
iProduct 2 EPSON Scanner
iSerial 0
bNumConfigurations 1
Configuration Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 2
wTotalLength 39
bNumInterfaces 1
bConfigurationValue 1
iConfiguration 0
bmAttributes 0xc0
Self Powered
MaxPower 100mA
Interface Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 4
bInterfaceNumber 0
bAlternateSetting 0
bNumEndpoints 3
bInterfaceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class
bInterfaceSubClass 255 Vendor Specific Subclass
bInterfaceProtocol 255 Vendor Specific Protocol
iInterface 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x81 EP 1 IN
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes
bInterval 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x02 EP 2 OUT
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes
bInterval 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x83 EP 3 IN
bmAttributes 3
Transfer Type Interrupt
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0008 1x 8 bytes
bInterval 16
Device Qualifier (for other device speed):
bLength 10
bDescriptorType 6
bcdUSB 2.00
bDeviceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class
bDeviceSubClass 255 Vendor Specific Subclass
bDeviceProtocol 255 Vendor Specific Protocol
bMaxPacketSize0 64
bNumConfigurations 1
Device Status: 0x0001
Self Powered
Can anybody tell if it would be possible for a kernel module and sane to access it at once? 🙂
If there is the chance, I might look at it once I feel better. I haven’t written or touched a kernel module in so much time that I’m feeling like doing some work in that regard. And the code to actually get the data out of the scanner should be present in scanbuttond already, it’s just a matter of getting it “pushed in” rather than “polled for”.
Once I could get the buttons working, I’d probably be working on a GTK-based frontend for scanimage with handling of those, so I could just use those rather than having to set it up manually. Although the nice thing of scanimage is that, through that, tiffcp and tiff2pdf, I can quickly create a multi-page PDF of the scan (the first command creates a multi-page TIFF file, the second converts it to PDF), and if I do the scan in lineart (the perfect solution for B/W text) it also is tremendously small in size. I should try to have the same result with my frontend. My idea would be a light frontend written in Ruby, calling the commands directly.
Oh well, at any rate, this will have to wait till I’m feeling really better, or maybe it’s just unfeasible because of the way it’d need to access the scanner from kernel and libusb.