Reviving the Pakon film scanner (opens in new tab)

Like steve_austin said, releasing the code is in a grey area. Realistically, it's highly unlikely that anyone would actually be upset about it, so it may happen in the future.

Linux support is a completely different beast. There is a lot of code that I didn't talk about, including the absolutely massive image post-processing/color-correction library that we only have a Windows version of (and no source code for, obviously.) The Pakon's added complexity (especially automatically finding frame boundaries) makes a cross-platform, source-code-less port extremely unlikely to succeed in a remotely reasonable amount of time.

It seems like a grey area. Especially given that the driver is a mash-up of sample code from a third-party hardware SDK and a Microsoft book, would Kodak/Pakon really care?

I would think the only part of the software that still might retain trade secrets would be the color management code, and that's not in the driver.

Fun fact: People born in 2004 are all turning 18 this year :)

And still, 2004 feels "a few years ago" to me. I don't know if I'll ever get used to it.

Indeed it does. I was born a few years later :-) That's what I love about "digital archaeology" like this - it's so much fun to find and explore things from a time you can't possibly imagine on your own.

Good point about the Cypress acquisition. While I was investigating part of the driver code recently, I realized it was based on FX2 sample code. The development kit that I got, on the other hand, was pre-FX2. The article notes that Cypress acquired Anchor Chips, the original creator of EZ-USB, in 1999, which would seem to line up perfectly with the time frame in which the Pakon scanners were developed.

> more so when source code isn't even needed, contrary to what many FOSS advocates think

Source code isn’t always needed, it just makes the process simpler and quicker. There’s way more old devices that people would like to continue to use than there are hackers with the time and skills to reverse engineer them! For example, I’ve been lurking on the Magic Lantern forums (alternative firmware for canon dslrs) and the time it takes to port the software to a new camera model is counted in years…

To reduce e-waste I think companies should be obliged to release the source code to their devices when they stop supporting them (and if they’re afraid of releasing trade secrets—they’ll just have to keep supporting them longer!).

Patched versions of the original drivers will be released, along with the new drivers. I'm not sure if I'll release the source code yet because of the legal gray area around this sort of work, but it's still something I'm considering.

I think it's less about "level of expertise" than it is about having a willingness to explore, learn, and analyse. IMHO working in ring0 isn't a huge change in difficulty than ring3, despite the different environment. Device drivers are mainly libraries that translate between interfaces.

>I think it's still nightmare because Windows require driver signature verification by default

I've taken care of that already :) My custom drivers are properly signed and basically ready to release once I tidy up some loose ends.

I'm not entirely sure if this really needs to run at the kernel level. In the future I might investigate converting it to a user-mode driver, but for now I think a signed kernel-mode driver will suffice.

The service manual recommends hitting the film channel with compressed air every couple of weeks. If you do that and keep it covered when not in use dust is not an issue.

The way the scanner deals with dust is by complaining that there's dust :-) (It doesn't have a special dust error, AFAIK, but it does do some checks that will end up failing if too much dust has accumulated.)

The way to avoid dust accumulation is to keep it covered when it's not being used. That works nicely and is a reasonable thing to do anyway.

Good question - honestly, I forgot. Also, there are multiple models that look very different, so then the question becomes: which one do I show?

In any case, those who are really curious won't have a hard time finding pictures. I'll include some next time :-)

TIL about PCI-X. Northlight looks like a pretty cool piece of hardware! It's cool to see what other obscure stuff is out there - that's why I like Hacker News :-)

The custom drivers will be released soon :-) If you're not in the Pakon Facebook group, I recommend requesting to join it, since there's a lot of useful information there.

http://sane-project.org/ https://openprinting.github.io/gsoc2019/03-sane-module/

I've added a picture of my scanner to the article :-)

I've addressed this a couple of times in response to others, but the main problem is that there are multiple models that look quite different from each other. I could pick one, but that wouldn't be telling the whole story, or I could show them all and add extra clutter to the page.

That being said, I'll probably just pick a model and add a picture to the article. Google Images is good for finding the others.

I had never even heard the name "Walter Oney" before I started researching this thing. I was pleasantly surprised by how well his 20 year old code held up, though.

Alas, Pakon only scans 35mm film. No 120. I wish.

That does look pretty cool!

Apologies for jumping into code - this is "Hacker" News, after all. The feedback is still appreciated. I actually meant to include pictures but forgot :/

The practical results can best be described as 36 super high-quality TIFFs (if you scan a full 35mm roll) obtained in just a couple of minutes. You can find more information by looking at other online sources - one I'd recommend reading, if you're interested, is https://www.dantestella.com/technical/f235plus.html.

I'm not surprised that it's relatively unknown - after all, digital photography has mostly taken over, and even those people who benefited from drug-store film development/scanning probably wouldn't have cared too much about what hardware was in use.

A more accurate title would be "Reviving the coolest scanner you've probably never heard of", but it was already a bit long.

I make no claims about my own coolness :-)