Scanning documents using an mfc-8480dn

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

Reply to
bob prohaska
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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.

Reply to
Pancho

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

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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

Reply to
bob prohaska

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

Thanks for the hint,

bob prohaska

Reply to
bob prohaska

Long shot: since your AIO supports IPP (AirPrint), it *might* support AirSc an (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 a lso use it with the simple scanimage command line tool, which is faster tha n xsane once you know your way around it.

cheers, Stewart

Reply to
Stewart Russell

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

Reply to
bob prohaska

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

Reply to
Martin Gregorie

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

-- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org

Reply to
Martin Gregorie

Not that I know of.

But it might be reverse engineerable if its all networked

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

#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

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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.

Reply to
Pancho

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

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

bob prohaska wrote in news:sg19gp$djj$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Yep! Can use

formatting link
simply, fast, efficent and for all RPI.

formatting link

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Reply to
Allen

"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.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

My first post on this usenet group,

But according to

formatting link

There are now versions for ARM32 and ARM64 on Linux

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Chris Hughes
Reply to
Chris Hughes

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..

Reply to
Johann Klammer

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

Reply to
bob prohaska

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
Reply to
Joe

But only foe WINDOWS on ARM, not LINUX

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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