# Re: Volunteer for back end development - excellent info in this msg

Mathew sienko x7439 (msienko@galaxy.nsc.com)
Wed, 8 Dec 1999 16:00:26 -0800 (PST)

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Hi David,

I'm glad to see that you are still interested. If you do plan on experamenting,
then perhaps I should what I've been thinking about. I haven't actually
started working on this yet because we've been quite buisy lately, but
I hope to start soon.

The merlin chips are all controlled through a register file and everything
is done by reading or writing these registers. The datasheet describes
these registers. The backend should then have two parts: functions to
read and write these registers, and then the SANE API implementation that
actually uses these functions to controll the scanner. This way, the
interface can change and all the SANE API's can still be used. (Future
versions of merlin may use a different interface, but this is still too
far away to tell.) My first goal is to be able to read and write one
register at a time. If I get any work done on this, I'll post it to
the sane mailing list.

I also have a question that I am hoping you will be able to answer. In
SANE, the back-ends can be built as shared libraries so that an application
can easily change back-ends. Would it be easy (or possible) to separate
the two functionalities I mentioned above into two separate library files?
Also, can an application load and unload these back-end libraries while
it is running? I think this would be cool because then an application
could launch that is not tied to a specific scanner and the user could
choose which driver to use and, for the merlin driver, choose the I/O
interface if necessary.

Matt
>
>
> Hi Mathew,
>
> I really dropped the ball on this one. I had hoped to 'experiment' with
> my 4200 using the pdf docs from NatSemi...just havn't had time to sit down
> with it. I've forward this to the sane-devel list since that should be
> the best source for developers. I did ask Peter if he could recommend
> anyone and noone came to his mind.
>
> Regards,
> /\/elson
>

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