Re: Agfa Horizon

Kevin Charter (charter@cs.ualberta.ca)
Wed, 4 Feb 1998 11:41:53 -0700 (MST)

>
> I realize that there is no backend written for the Agfa Horizon. The only
> Agfa product I have seen a driver for is the Snapscan. In a post a while
> back (I believe in Jan.) when the Snapscan backend was announced it was
> mentioned that there is no support for flatbed scanners and probably won't

No support for flatbed scanners other than the SnapScan.

> be any time soon. Now if I were to write a backend for this scanner would
> I base it off of the snapscan code, incorperate it into the snapscan code

It depends on how different the Horizon's programming interface is
from the SnapScan's. There are plenty of similarities in organization
between the SnapScan backend and the other SANE backends, but the
particulars of which SCSI sommands to use, in what order, and with
what data is where things get really different. So far, we've seen
programming information for the SnapScan (300), the DuoScan, and the
StudioScan, and they are all really very different. That's why the
snapscan backend only supports the snapscan for the reasonably
forseeable future.

> or have to start from stratch. Also as of right now I have had no luck
> obtaining any specs on this scanner.
> Does anyone have these specs or know where I could get them?

Michel Roelofs <michelr@stack.nl> has had some luck getting
programming information from AGFA Belgium. But the company could be
reluctant to release programming info for recent scanner models. I
suspect we may have gotten the specs for the SnapScan 300 because the
310 was just coming out at the time.

> Would testing code for this backend be dangerous? Could It cause hardware
> damage. This scanner is not exactly cheap and I don't feel like messing it
> up.

As far as I know the the most likely way to cause scanner damage is
the driver manages to get the scanner ccd to move, but either can't
get it to stop or feeds in the wrong scanning window dimensions, and
it moves past the end of the physical scanning area. If you don't turn
the scanner off I imagine you can damage the motor, the ccd, or
both. Other than that, feeding garbage commands into your scanner
might cause it to hang, but I doubt you can do much physical damage.

I hope that helps,

Kevin

-- 
Kevin Charter                        /\                      Grad Studies
charter@cs.ualberta.ca            /\/  \  Department of Computing Science
http://web.cs.ualberta.ca/~charter  \   --------    University of Alberta
	       		             --------------    Edmonton AB CANADA



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