Arduino for STM32

I recently acquired an old Kodak pcd film scanner 2000. This is a suitcase sized behemoth that was state of the art back in 1995. I worked with the resulting scans when at apple back then. Part of one of the biggest and most unpopular products in history. The Kodak PhotoCD. When I was not at Apple I worked on an even bigger scanner for a company that bought iTek (what made the cameras on the Moon,Apollo and mars. So this thing is sort of a nostalgia kick.

I tried to buy one of these things a decade ago. This time I got it for the cost of shipping. No drivers, manuals etc. Just a 70 pound box of 'parts.' I took it apart cleaned it and re-assembled it. The micro controller is made from 4 5x8 cards in a steel Faraday cage. The ADC is 5x12 inches. The scanning camera is of optical laboratory grade on a dampened framework.

The connectors on the back are narrow SCSI-2. (50 pin micro-D) The closest driver I could find is for the even larger Kodak PCS FilmScanner 4050. Looks like that might have a similar interface. The code was easy to dump as it contains the mangled C++ debug function names. (Learned a lot about name Mangling as I wrote my own mangler in postscript.)

The scanner powers up and does a self test.

My project would be to make some sort of bridge probably using Ethernet to probe the SCSI port. I did some searching, but most of the results relate to emulating SCSI target devices. I am looking to do the HBA initiator using one of my STM32F429 boards.

So far I have not found any hits for such a library. The SCSI physical layer is pretty simple, A 25 pin parallel interface. The other 25 pins are for ground/bus termination as every other pin is ground. Most of the hardware interface design, is that this is supposed to run rather fast (by 1980s) standards. Scanners are not known for needing Raid speeds. My Pipe organ interfaces have level shifters that can handle 15 to 18 volts. So the hardware should not be an issue. The pipe organs also use 50 pin centronix connectors and old pbx phone cable too.

Probably wasted more time on this the last month than I should. So thought to ask before jumping in to an even larger project, if such already existed.

sheepdoll;

... maybe use a rPi as a gateway? https://hackaday.com/2017/05/01/the-ras ... si-device/

I have the small PC Nikon slide/negative scanner which is SCSI 2, only reason to maintain a Win-XP PC

Ray

The pi is a target device (Typically a hard drive emulation.) I am looking for the other direction host initiator.
The pi also requires level shifters. I already have this on the existing STM board.

The small Nikon scanner is what put Kodak out of buisness. Seems strange that back in the mid 1990s filmscanners were 100s of thousands of dollars. Then the Nicon came out for 1K. By the end of the century, thes things cost a few hundred. I have a cheap USB film scanner. It is all plastic. The drivers only work on 32 bit. (There is a newer driver called ViewScan, but they want more $$$ for a full version.)

VueScan is a superb piece of software sheepdoll, I use it regularly to drive an Epson V700. The asking price (which is lifetime) has been exceptionally reasonable for the 12+ years I've used it so far.

I use it quite successfully to scan 6x7, 5x4, & 8x10 colour film.

Http://benneh.net for anyone who wants a peep.

Naturally I'd also love to own a more capable scanner, something like a Howtek or Heidelberg - those are also scsi connected and typically sell with an apple mac to run them. Somewhat outside of my budget for the now.

I made a blog post of the teardown of the scanner https://delectra.com/toys/?p=170

-julie