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Archive for October 1st, 2013

Use the Scan to PC function on a Samsung Multifunction

October 1st, 2013 by

So I went out and bought myself a spanking new multifunction creature from Samsung called a CLX3305FN. Generally, this fits into the CLX3300 series, but it has LAN only – no wifi (that would be the CLX3305FW). One of the reasons I decided I wanted this was because of the advertised “Scan to PC” function. I figured it would be simple on Windows and that I’d be able to get it working on Linux through YaST or sane/scanimage etc – i.e. a PITA but it would work.

As it turned out, it didn’t work at all. The function is supposed to be for Windows only. However, the clever lads over at bchemnet.com reverse engineered the protocol that was used between the scanner and a windows PC and managed to hack a script together which runs as a server daemon. It just sits there twiddling its thumbs until a user presses the “Scan to PC” button on the printer/scanner. Then it kicks into action and uses sane to send scan commands to the scanner. The result of it is that the scan lands in $HOME/Scans/ – thus, the Scan To PC function is neatly implemented for Linux. There are, of course, rough edges (such as the scanner sending in RAW rather than JPEG) but nothing that couldn’t be fixed in a hackweek.

So where can you get it? The package is available at http://software.opensuse.org/package/python-samsungScannerServer – but you’ll need to install the Samsung Unified Driver for Linux first. I found it at http://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/CLX-3305FN but apparently bchemnet.com has a repo for debian/ubuntu where you can download it too. Once you install that and my package, you’ll probably have to do a systemctl start samsungScannerServer (“probably” because I don’t really know how systemd worked and schustered together a .service file based on google search results).

Another nice hackweek project would be to use something like inotify to discover incoming scanned files, gpg to encrypt them and email them to the user (and then delete the unencrypted version). I also need to look into getting the unified samsung driver working on ARM so I can use my raspberry as a scan server which sends encrypted scans to my email address…