Last update October 24th, 2004 Bertrik Sikken

Warning: the 'niash' backend for HP3300C, HP3400C, HP4300C and Agfa Snapscan Touch scanners has been accepted into SANE, the info on this page is possibly outdated!

Introduction
Methods and tools
Transfer protocol (on separate page)
Scanner registers (on separate page)
Development (on separate page)

See also the HP3300 backend page on sourceforge for downloads, a forum, CVS archive, etc. .
Here's the README.html for getting the testtool and the SANE backend to run on your scanner.

Introduction

This page describes my experiences with the hp scanjet 3300C scanner, which is not supported under Linux (yet). This information is meant to eventually lead to a SANE backend for all scanners using a NIASH chip, but work will be concentrated on the HP3300C (which I have personally).

The NIASH chip is found in the following scanners (bold = my scanner):

Manufacturer	Model	ASIC	Analog front-end	USB ID
Hewlett-Packard	Scanjet 3300c	NIASH00012 NIASH00013 NIASH00014	ESIC ES8100QA WM8143-12	03F0-0205
Agfa	Snapscan Touch	NIASH00014	ESIC ES8100QA	06BD-0100
Hewlett-Packard	Scanjet 3400c	NIASH00019	WM8143-12	03F0-0405
Hewlett-Packard	Scanjet 4300c	NIASH00019	ESIC ES8100QA	03F0-0305

The following scanners are not supported but they are mentioned because people ask a lot about them.

Manufacturer	Model	ASIC	Analog front-end	USB ID	See also
Hewlett-Packard	Scanjet 3500c	RealTek RTS8801C2-6	built-in	03F0-2205	Realtek product info
Hewlett-Packard	Scanjet 3570c	?	?	03F0-2005
Hewlett-Packard	Scanjet 4400c	13010070-5011	?	03F0-0705	HP44x0 page at sourceforge Michael Cohen's page
Hewlett-Packard	Scanjet 4470c	RTS8891	?	03F0-0805	HP44x0 page at sourceforge Michael Cohen's page
Hewlett-Packard	Scanjet 5400c	NIASH00033	???	03F0-1005	HP5400 backend page at Sourceforge Local info (possibly obsolete)
Hewlett-Packard	Scanjet 5470c	NIASH00033	???	03F0-1105

Hardware

The HP3300C is an USB color scanner. It is externally powered. On the front is has two buttons that can trigger the scanner software to make either a scan or a copy. It has a horizontal resolution of 600 DPI (5300 pixels) and a vertical resolution of 1200 lines per inch.

It has the following chipset:

NIPEDC0804, two rows of 20 pins along bottom and top edge. It has a 12.000 MHz crystal mounted close to it. This chip was mentioned as an 'interface' chip on an electronics web page. The pinout of this chip is very similar to the Genesys Logic GL640USB chip (datasheet available).
KM2Q65R, T224162B-28J, '100 Mhz', a 256k x 16 EDO DRAM chip from Taiwan Memory Technology (TMTech) (datasheet available). The HP3400C has a EliteMT 100 MHz M11B416256A, also a 256k x 16 DRAM chip.
ESIC ES8100QA, pins on all four sides, the 'analog-front-end'. Also the Wolfson Micro WM8143 (datasheet available) has been reported. These two chips seem to be completely compatible.
NIASH00014, pins on all four sides, 100 in total. This is the main controller IC. It has a 20.000 MHz crystal on pins 61 and 62. Two HP3400c scanners have been reported to contain a NIASH00019 chip.

Methods and tools

Inspection of USB traffic

USB snoopy is used for USB traffic analysis under Windows. It shows the type of messages going over the USB and their contents. The large amount of data coming past USB snoopy can sometimes cause the USB log to miss some data, so I made a slightly modified version for v0.12 and modified version for v0.13 that does not show the contents of the USB bulk transfers.

Documentation

HP Scanner Control Language, does not apply to this scanner :(
USB specs v1.1 at www.usb.org
Parallel port specs. Beyond logic has some good info.
Other SANE backends. The one for the E3 chipset for example.
LM9830 scanner-on-a-chip specs. Although this scanner does not use this chip, it provides a good comparison.

Useful links

SANE homepage
Tim Waugh's libieee1284 for parallel port access.
The libusb pages at SourceForge.
Quite Insane, a SANE frontend GUI.
XSane, a SANE frontend GUI.

Contents