dcp1610

An experimental implementation of Brother network scanner protocol.

Quickstart

Install

git clone https://github.com/Equidamoid/dcp1610.git
pip install --user dcp1610

Make sure you have your <USER_BASE>/bin in $PATH. To get your USER_BASE path, run python3 -m site |grep USER_BASE

Usage

# Simple scan, full page, grayscale, 100dpi, output file - scan.png, find the scanner automatically
dcp1016-scan

# Scan top half of the page in color and 400dpi, save as mypage.png
dcp1610-scan --color -H 0.5 -d 400 -o mypage.png

The script will try to find the scanner in your local network using zeroconf request. In some cases (nasty routers, wicked network configuration, etc) the discovery may fail, like that:

% dcp1610-scan
[2017-07-30 22:14:30,130] Querying MDNS for _scanner._tcp.local.
[2017-07-30 22:14:35,347] No scanner found in 5 sec
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./dcp1610-scan", line 48, in <module>
    main()
  File "./dcp1610-scan", line 39, in main
    address, name = dcp1610.discovery.find_scanner()
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable

In this case (or if you want to save couple of seconds on discovery) you may specify the scanner ip as a positional argument:

dcp1016-scan 192.168.1.5

See dcp1610-scan -h for the list of parameters.

Known bugs/planned features

Hardcoded model-specific things

The script probably will not work well with non-flatbed scanners (they have extra "next page" message, I don't know how it looks like and how should I handle it). Also supported scanning modes may differ from model to model

It is slow!

The bottleneck for high-res full page scans is network data transfer (you can hear how it stops when some internal buffer is full), need to implement support for compressed images.

Scan button

It is possible to make a "daemon mode" listening for device's scan button.

Q&A

Will it work with my scanner?

To be honest, no idea. I only have DCP-1610W and it works pretty good with it.

Will it break my scanner?

I can't guarantee that. Use at your own risk.

It does not work. What now?

First, try to file a bug. If you have different scanner than I have, you'll have to use Wireshark and the stock "driver" to get an example of how to talk with your scanner.

It may happen that protocol differs a lot and your device is out of scope for this project.