A simple one button scanning software that turns your WIA compatible scanner into a networked scanner. WARNING: This is only a prototype that still need some work and will propably need some fixing with some scanners.
In a small office like mine, when you have one innexpensive scanner connected to single computer, the usual scanning procedure goes as follow:
- Walk to the scanner
- Put your documents in the scanner
- Go back to your computer
- Connect to the scanner using remote desktop or another scanner sharing software (couldn't find any that's free)
- Scan your documents using the device's software
- If remote desktop then save your document on a network folder then copy them on your computer
- Walk to the scanner and take back your documents
- Walk to your computer again
With this small program you can use any USB device (say a numpad or those emergency buttons you can find on the web) to launch the scanning procedure and have your documents saved on a network location. The procedure is now:
- Walk to the scanner
- Put your documents in the scanner
- Push the button
- Take back your documents and walk to your computer
- A WIA scanner USB connected to a Windows XP / 7 computer
- The .Net framework (probably at least in v4)
- A LibUsbDotNet installation to create a driver and configure your button the first time http://sourceforge.net/projects/libusbdotnet/
- Install LibUsbDotNet
- Use InfWizard.exe to create a driver for your device
- Go to Windows' device manager and replace your device's driver by the newly generated
- Run Test_Bulk.exe, select your device, try an endpoint (usually 1) and click 'open'
- Click 'read', push a button on your device and look what's read
- Run the app
- Select your scanner in the list (if it fails make sure wiaaut.dll is present and registered on your system)
- Test the scanner
- Enter VID and PID as shown next to your device's name in Test_Bulk.exe
- Enter the size of the message to read as shown on Test_Bulk.exe after you pushed a single button
- Try to click 'Connect' to test your triggering device
- Push da button!
Have a look at the log.txt file if something seems to go wrong. The configuration is saved in a simple (config.xml) file in the same directory to allow you to start the program as a scheduled task witout having to bother with which user is running it.
- Find contributors
- Improve compatibility with most scanner brands (currently working well with brother)
- Implement image compression
- Save images on disk on by one instead of at the end (can be a problem when scanning more than 20 pages on old computers)
- Implement a better way of selecting the triggering device than providing VID and PID
- Implement an actually reading of the triggering device's signal to allow different action depending on which button is pressed
- Refactor some code here and there