Brother scanner + linux (ubuntu server).

This post is part of my "nas-box project". You can read about hardware setup and other stuff in README on my github repo.

I have old(ish) all-in-one printer/scanner device Brother DCP-7030. When I scan some documents I like to do this only with buttons on the device. Without need to go to computer and click "scan" or merge PDFs manually. So when I decided not to buy proper NAS (which costs 2x what i paid for simple computer) first task was to create printer/scanner friendly env.

Happily Brother has good linux support and below you can find info what scripts I created, what they do and how I configured device under ubuntu server (13.04 currently).

Those scripts are prepared to work with brscan3 models)
In "brother" directory you can find scripts that I hacked to use hardware options to do what I want them to do (scan to tiff, pdf, merge multipages only with scanner) ;)

Dependencies:

• libtiff-tools (for tiff2pdf)
• poppler-utils (for pdfunite)
• sane-utils (for scanimage)
• brscan3 64bit
• scan-key-tool 64bit

Missing stuff:

Copy stuff

Brother manual

For brscan3 Users:
/usr/lib64/libbrscandec3.so.1.0.0
/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-brother3.so.1.0.7
/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-brother3.so.1
/usr/lib64/sane/libsane-brother3.so
/usr/lib64/libbrscandec3.so
/usr/lib64/libbrscandec3.so.1

Update udev

Brother manual

Now for Ubuntu 10.10 and above there is .deb with udev file/rules.
But still that didn't work for me out of the box.
All I needed to do is unhash lines in /etc/udev/rules.d/40-brother-libsane-type1.rules:

MODE="0666"
GROUP="scanner"
ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"
SYMLINK+="scanner-%k"

Update cfg

To use bash instead of sh edit /etc/opt/brother/scanner/brscan-skey/brscan-skey-0.2.4-0.cfg and update:

IMAGE="bash  /opt/brother/scanner/brscan-skey/script/scantoimage-0.2.4-0.sh"
OCR="bash  /opt/brother/scanner/brscan-skey/script/scantoocr-0.2.4-0.sh"
EMAIL="bash  /opt/brother/scanner/brscan-skey/script/scantoemail-0.2.4-0.sh"
FILE="bash  /opt/brother/scanner/brscan-skey/script/scantofile-0.2.4-0.sh"

Modes

Scan to image

I'm using this to scan multiple pages.

1. just plain scan to tiff

Scan to file

I'm using this If I scanned multiple pages document and next document is single page. Also It can be used as single

1. search for *.tiff files in $SCAN_PATH, convert them to PDF and merge to one pdf, delete all tiffs
2. scan current document to tiff
3. convert new single scan to pdf
4. delete original tiff

Scan to e-mail

I'm using this when I scanned multiple pages document (and now it's time to convert it to pdf)
and I'm going to scan another multipage document.

1. search for *.tiff files in $SCAN_PATH, convert them to PDF and merge.
2. scan current document to tiff (no convertion to pdf)

Scan to ocr

Just plain merge of multiple pages document (PDFs).
This task may hang a minute before you can scan more with hardware button, use cancel and stop on
printer/scanner to stop after merging.

1. search for *.tiff files in $SCAN_PATH, convert them to PDF and merge.
2. no scanning needed