[HN Gopher] WebAssembly+WebUSB port of the SANE scanner library ___________________________________________________________________ WebAssembly+WebUSB port of the SANE scanner library Author : RReverser Score : 72 points Date : 2023-04-29 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | dvh wrote: | Many years ago friend gave me broken SCSI scanner. It always said | "paper jammed". I thought I just short or remove the paper sensor | but it wasn't simple kind of sensor, there were two and from the | delay it decided whether the paper was jammed or not. | | So I downloaded the source code of SANE, find the offending error | message, commented it out and scanner worked without issue. | AshamedCaptain wrote: | I had one of these stupid AMD graphics cards (I think from the | Evergreen generation) where the GPU/memory clocks would be | locked in at the highest frequency whenever you had a second | monitor plugged in. Apparently some sort of graphical glitches | would be possible otherwise. In their infinite wisdom, AMD | decided it was worth an extra 20W of baseline power consumption | to avoid these glitches. (I am told they still do this as of | today). | | So I went the radeon kernel driver, and simply commented out | that part. Never had a single glitch for the entire lifetime of | the card, but oh god I did enjoy the silent fan-free operation. | | And people wonder why I'm a staunch fanatic of free software. | chaxor wrote: | https://gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Why-Does-it-... | jmillikin wrote: | IMO one of the biggest opportunities for WASM is printer and | scanner drivers. These things have historically been distributed | as native code, so the usability of the hardware on various OSes | and architectures is spotty[0]. WASM is close enough to a native | binary (fast, not source[1]) to be accepted by hardware vendors, | but is inherently architecture-independent and in principle could | be built to an OS-indendent API. Imagine sharing the exact same | drivers for tens of thousands of devices across Windows, Mac, | Linux, and every other OS that might exist in the future! | | The same applies to webcams, screensavers (with WebGL/WebGPU), | audio processing plugins, and any other software that doesn't | come bundled into the OS and doesn't have a UI as such. | | The utility of WebASM for non-Web use cases is incredible. | | [0] My scanner is by Epson, who have good Linux support, but the | driver was built against an ancient GNU libc that's no longer | distributed by Debian/Ubuntu. And it's amd64, so I can't use a | RaspberryPi as a scan server. | | [1] I prefer open source when available, but hardware vendors | often have cultural or contractual blocks against open-sourcing | their drivers. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-04-29 23:00 UTC)