SANE driver for Mustek parallel port scanners

History of the CIS driver

Some time ago, I bought myself a (cheap) LifeTec (also known as Medion) LT9350 parallel port flatbed scanner. In reality, this scanner is a Mustek 1200CP in disguise.

Not to my surprise, I soon found out that there were no Linux drivers available for this model. So I decided to write a driver myself. Luckily, someone (Jochen Eisinger) had already written a SANE driver for other Mustek parallel port scanners. His driver worked reasonably well for the models based on CCD (charge coupled device) technology. My scanner uses CIS (contact image sensor) technology, however. CIS models are cheaper, but also less accurate. At the time, Mustek did not disclose any information on the communication protocols of their scanners. Jochen Eisinger had done a terrific job on monitoring and decoding the protocols used by the TWAIN driver, which allowed him to write a SANE driver which was usable for several CCD models. With his help, and after countless evenings of staring at bits and bytes transmitted and received by the TWAIN driver, I also managed to write a driver for my scanner. It was not very reliable, though, because I was never able to fully decode the protocols.

At the end of 2000, when I had almost given up on improving the driver, Mustek decided to change its policy wrt. to their support for the Linux community. More in particular, they provided me with the source code of the TWAIN driver for their CIS type scanners on simple request. This allowed me to find the missing pieces (and to place some other pieces at the correct places :-). As a result, the SANE driver for the CIS type scanners is now close to perfect and supports 3 different CIS models (600CP, 1200CP, and 1200CP+).

Originally, my CIS driver was only available as a patch against the CCD driver. It was not possible to build a single Mustek driver with support for both the CCD and CIS models. The CCD driver has been part of the SANE backends package since a long time. Recently, Jochen designed a new driver architecture that allows the CCD drivers and CIS drivers to co-exist. This new driver has replaced the old one in version 1.0.10 of SANE.

Last update: February 5, 2003

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