Scanning documents using an mfc-8480dn

[bob prohaska]

Can a Brother MFC-8480dn all-in-one printer/scanner/fax be used to
scan and import images into a Pi4 running RaspiOS? I've got gimp
and xsane installed, but neither can see the 8480. However, it
functions just fine as a network printer, so at least the
communications part is working ok. I can telnet into the printer,
but apart from looking around I'm fairly clueless. Typing
show netscan reports
Network scan is enabled
but that's all she writes.

I gather there are "scanner drivers" named brscan2 and brscan3,
but neither is available via apt-get and it's unclear if they're
even relevant to linux or the Raspberry Pi.

Thanks for reading, and any suggestions!

bob prohaska

[Pancho]

As an alternative idea...

From my scanner (not a Brother), you can scan directly to a network
share mounted on the rpi, in my case SMB. I suspect this would work on
the MFC-8480dn, too. I also suspect the MFC-8480dn provides a web
interface - "Web based management".

Everything is done from the scanner, so no driver is required on the rpi.

If required you can also set up stuff like OCR on the rPi, e.g. OCRmyPDF.

[The Natural Philosopher]

On 24/08/2021 00:03, bob prohaska wrote:

scanning support is poor for most scanners
Sometimes the manufacturer will provide x86 drivers and code. otherwise
you have to rely on sometimes minimal support via SANE.

I have disabled that for my scanner, since it drove it past its end
stops and use only the Epson supplied X86 program


--
To ban Christmas, simply give turkeys the vote.

[bob prohaska]

The Natural Philosopher <t...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 24/08/2021 00:03, bob prohaska wrote:
>> Can a Brother MFC-8480dn all-in-one printer/scanner/fax be used to
>> scan and import images into a Pi4 running RaspiOS? I've got gimp
>> and xsane installed, but neither can see the 8480. However, it
>> functions just fine as a network printer, so at least the
>> communications part is working ok. I can telnet into the printer,
>> but apart from looking around I'm fairly clueless. Typing
>> show netscan reports
>> Network scan is enabled
>> but that's all she writes.
>>
>>

> scanning support is poor for most scanners
> Sometimes the manufacturer will provide x86 drivers and code. otherwise
> you have to rely on sometimes minimal support via SANE.
>
> I have disabled that for my scanner, since it drove it past its end
> stops and use only the Epson supplied X86 program

Is that to say xsane is my only option? I thought maybe it
was part of something else that had to be installed.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

[bob prohaska]

Scanner docs aren't a lot of help, but I'll start digging.

Thanks for the hint,

bob prohaska

[Stewart Russell]

Long shot: since your AIO supports IPP (AirPrint), it *might* support AirScan (aka eSCL). So try

sudo apt install sane-airscan

then try firing up xsane. It might offer you the option of your scanner on the network (can take a while). One you know the AirScan address, you can also use it with the simple scanimage command line tool, which is faster than xsane once you know your way around it.

cheers,
Stewart

[bob prohaska]

Alas, sane-airscan isn't found by apt. However, I don't think it'll help
anyway, the printer/scanner/fax is wired-network only. I can run xsane
and it reports no devices found, even though the web management page
comes up just fine using the printer's IP number in chromium. Running
apropos scanner
shows a list of scanner drivers, but nothing for Brother. Running
sane-find-scanner seems to look only for USB and parallel scanners, so
that's no help.

Brother's website claims support for Linux, but I'm pretty sure that'll
be for x86 flavors only, unless the driver is written in some hardware-
agnostic way. Is that a possibility?

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

[Martin Gregorie]

On Thu, 26 Aug 2021 19:43:26 +0000, bob prohaska wrote:

> Brother's website claims support for Linux, but I'm pretty sure that'll
> be for x86 flavors only, unless the driver is written in some hardware-
> agnostic way. Is that a possibility?
>

How much detail can you find on the Brother website or in searches?
Have you tried looking at their website from an RPi?

Might be worth doing that simply because the amount of detail does vary
between printer and scanner makers. I know nothing about Brother, but was
quite impressed by the detail that HP provide and the variety of OS/
hardware that they support. Samr goes for Epson.

The other thing to keep an eye out for is that some brands, notably Epson
and HP, use a very standard set of commands to drive their hardware: I've
successfully used the driver for an Epson MX80 (monochrome 8 pin dor
matrix printer to get perfect print from both their 24 pin LQ dot matrix
and their Stylus series inkjets because all use doalects of the same
Esc/P command set. Similarly, I know that the print command set of the
old HP Laserjet 2 printer gets god results driving any of their later
printers (LJ5 and M402 series lasers).

Not promising that this will help with a Brother, except that it seems
reasonable that, as a manufacturer adds features to class of device,
they'll extend a command set that they know already works rather than
slinging it away and starting over from scratch.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

[Martin Gregorie]

On Thu, 26 Aug 2021 20:58:50 +0000, Martin Gregorie wrote:

> How much detail can you find on the Brother website or in searches?
> Have you tried looking at their website from an RPi?
>

Meant to add "....because its possible they may tailor what their website
shows to match the hardware and OS that originated the request."

[The Natural Philosopher]

On 26/08/2021 20:43, bob prohaska wrote:
> Brother's website claims support for Linux, but I'm pretty sure that'll
> be for x86 flavors only, unless the driver is written in some hardware-
> agnostic way. Is that a possibility?

Not that I know of.

But it might be reverse engineerable if its all networked


--
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all
private property.

Karl Marx

[The Natural Philosopher]

On 26/08/2021 22:02, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Aug 2021 20:58:50 +0000, Martin Gregorie wrote:
>
>> How much detail can you find on the Brother website or in searches?
>> Have you tried looking at their website from an RPi?
>>
> Meant to add "....because its possible they may tailor what their website
> shows to match the hardware and OS that originated the request."

#LINUX
Scanner Driver (Download)
File Name: brscan3-0.2.13-1.i386.deb
File Format: .deb
Ver.0.2.13-1 (latest version)
File Sizes: 0.05 MB

Support OS
Debian 32-bit OS.

Scanner Driver (Download)
File Name: brscan3-0.2.13-1.amd64.deb
File Format: .deb
Ver.0.2.13-1 (latest version)
File Sizes: 0.06 MB

Support OS
Debian 64-bit OS.

If the scanner driver has been installed on your system, updating
(overwriting-installing) can fix various problems, add new functions to
the machine printer, or just upgrade to the latest available version.

If you have decided that this driver package is what you need, all you
need to do is click the download button and install the package on the
working printer. If not, check back with our website so that you don't
miss the releases needed on your system.

So debian and children on x86 only

[Pancho]

Yeah, I had a quick look and couldn't see save to network drive. I did
see that you could send scans to a smtp server, which is a round about
way of achieving the same thing.

[The Natural Philosopher]

very easy to set up one of those on a Pi...

--
"It is an established fact to 97% confidence limits that left wing
conspirators see right wing conspiracies everywhere"

[The Natural Philosopher]

On 27/08/2021 16:51, Allen wrote:
> bob prohaska <b...@www.zefox.net> wrote in news:sg19gp$djj$1...@dont-email.me:

>
>> Can a Brother MFC-8480dn all-in-one printer/scanner/fax be used to
>> scan and import images into a Pi4 running RaspiOS?
>

> Yep! Can use https://www.hamrick.com, simply, fast, efficent and for all RPI.
>
> https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/brother_mfc_8480dn.html#technical-information
>

"VueScan is compatible with the Brother MFC-8480DN on Windows x86,
Windows x64, Windows RT, Windows 10 ARM, Mac OS X and Linux."

But not ARM linux.

--
You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a
kind word alone.

Al Capone

[Chris Hughes]

In message <sgb4sf$4go$2...@dont-email.me>

The Natural Philosopher <t...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 27/08/2021 16:51, Allen wrote:
>> bob prohaska <b...@www.zefox.net> wrote in news:sg19gp$djj$1...@dont-email.me:
>>
>>> Can a Brother MFC-8480dn all-in-one printer/scanner/fax be used to
>>> scan and import images into a Pi4 running RaspiOS?
>>
>> Yep! Can use https://www.hamrick.com, simply, fast, efficent and for all
>> RPI.
>>
>> https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/brother_mfc_8480dn.html#technical-informat
>> ion
>>

> "VueScan is compatible with the Brother MFC-8480DN on Windows x86,
> Windows x64, Windows RT, Windows 10 ARM, Mac OS X and Linux."

> But not ARM linux.

My first post on this usenet group,

But according to https://www.hamrick.com/alternate-versions.html

There are now versions for ARM32 and ARM64 on Linux

--
Chris Hughes

[Johann Klammer]

I believe you have to install them from the brother homepage.
I have a DCP 7010 here. and had to do that....ages ago.. tho I do not remember
what exactly I did. I do remember digging through their source code to figure out why
my scans were truncated. (GIMP likes to crash on truncated pnm files)
So, you might have to fix that.
The brscan is a sane backend. So you will have to install that too.
use xsane et all, or their commandline versions.

sometimes you will get error messages as the printer driver(CUPS)
seems to fight in there with the sane driver over the USB port or something.
and there is always that one TCP packet stuck in the receive queue...

tcp 1 0 localhost.localdo:47019 localhost.localdoma:ipp CLOSE_WAIT
tcp 1 0 localhost.localdo:47020 localhost.localdoma:ipp CLOSE_WAIT

(it will /never/ close)


well, it is LINUX after all..

[bob prohaska]

Chris Hughes <new...@noonehere.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> But according to https://www.hamrick.com/alternate-versions.html
>
> There are now versions for ARM32 and ARM64 on Linux
>

Seems to be true. The website stuffed a downloaded file called
vuea32-9.765.tgz into my downloads directory without being asked.
It's claimed to be for a Raspberry Pi, which rather implies ARM..

I'm trying to use the tools available without spending money on
something that'll be used _very_ infrequently. The scanner has
a Scan to Nework and a Scan to FTP function that appears to be
configurable using the web server on the printer. So far I haven't
figured out what the configuration procedure is, but that's likely
the thing to pursue. So far, it seems that Brother's Control Center
software is key to setting it up, which is unfortunate.

In the worst case I can always scan to a USB stick...... and, it
still works with my old iMac.

Thanks to everybody !

bob prohaska


In the worst case
the machine will scan to a USB flash drive

[Joe]

Most modern printers will scan to email, but they don't generally have
an MTA built in (how daft is that?) so my oldest Pi is actually sitting
under a corporate desk somewhere running exim4 just for their scanner.

--
Joe

[The Natural Philosopher]

But only foe WINDOWS on ARM, not LINUX


--
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the
other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

—Soren Kierkegaard

[A. Dumas]

The Natural Philosopher <t...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 27/08/2021 18:10, Chris Hughes wrote:
>> But according to https://www.hamrick.com/alternate-versions.html
>> There are now versions for ARM32 and ARM64 on Linux
>>
> But only foe WINDOWS on ARM, not LINUX

It's there, check again.