The week before spring break, I started working with Theo on the serial code to get communication between the computer and the microcontroller on the manipulator device. Since the device connects using USB, it’s a matter of opening the serial ports and feeding commands at the right time to the manipulator device.
As for the program to automatically capture scans using the flatbed scanner, I’ve encountered. The file works fine before attempting a practical trial with the flatbed scanner. However, when I try to use the scanner with it I encounter a “lost connection with the scanner” error in the middle of scanner. I hear the scanner go off, but then it loses connection and doesn’t save the file. Online search wasn’t helpful, only suggesting to unplug and replug/restart the scanner, which I tried a few times unsuccessfully. I guessed it was something to do with file access permissions on my computer with the scanner, so I tried moving the project to more accessible file locations that definitely wouldn’t require admin, I tried running the script as an admin, I tried to see if there was an access permission the scanner was missing, I double checked that the device drivers were up to date, and nothing seemed to fix this issue. It’s extra confusing because I was able to scan and save just fine from the scanner’s native software and from the NAPS2 library software. I asked Theo to try downloading the project and running it to see maybe if it was an issue with Windows or my machine in particular. However, he encountered a lot of issues with trying to set up the dotnet project and the incompatibilities in the version of dotnet that the project required with his version of Linux.
So, in light of this I believe the best approach would be to pivot from trying to use the universal scan library of NAPS2 that requires a dotnet project. Instead, just a series of files instead that don’t rely on an existing framework. There would be a master file that receives the command from the Blender UI, checks the OS version, and then calls a corresponding file to make the scans based on the OS. This way, we would have a file for each OS version and each OS would be able to use a compatible scanning library. It also makes it so that we could incrementally ensure each OS works, ensuring one is done before moving on to the next. It would also ensure that something in general works, even if not compatible with every OS. Currently, I’m looking at WIA (Windows Imaging Acquisition) for Windows, SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) for Linux, and ImageCaptureCore (Apple API) for Mac. Since two of these are native to their OS’s and Linux is generally good with setting up libraries, I think these will work out better.