Re: miniature scanner

From: Philip Hood (email suppressed)
Date: Thu May 17 2007 - 14:58:02 PDT


On Thu, 17 May 2007, julie murray wrote:

> Hi Frameworkers,
> Would anyone know of software that will run a Poloroid iZone scanner on a
> Mac computer (Polaroid-provided software is for pc only) ? or can direct me
> to a geek site to ask same?
> Long live experimental everything.
>
> Julie Murray

hi julie - here's a post on a webpage:

http://burntelectrons.org/archive/1/2004-10

"
Programming Challenge!
Ok folks, this is a challenge. The prize will be a very hackable Polaroid
i-Zone Webster 'scanner' doohickey. It's more like a handheld webcam with
built in memory, although it can't do live streaming with the software
provided. You can however hack the interface software (TWAIN compliant),
hack the casing so it can take photos of stuff without holding it up
against the items, and it's got a simple serial interface (very simple) so
I'm sure an enterprising Linux hacker can figure out how to get the data
out of it.
"

with this device, what's happening is that the "scanner" takes
pictures and stores them to some memory of some sort, and then
connects to the computer via a serial cable - which is a bit odd
because most such devices are using USB. The program on
the PC is TWAIN compliant, so I guess that means the device is
as well.

It should,
in theory not be so difficult to write a program that pulled the
data out of the memory chip since there must be a handful of
free TWAIN libraries out there ... and have the data
stored off to some directory, but you'd probably not be able
to write it yourself. The only question is how you deal w/
pulling data off that serial port. Does the mac even have
that serial port anymore ? you might have to get some sort of
adapter ...

If I were really interested, I'd write to this "Grey" character
and ask him.

-ml
pth

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