Papscan

This application allows a scanner and keyboard to be used with a headless computer. Think of it like an open source photocopier. Keys are assigned to presets to run actions, such as 't' to do a 200 dpi greyscale scan to upload to a window file share (you may want to print out a list of presets).

• avoid getting a photocopier with expensive per sheet maintenance agreements
• unlimited flexibility in what you do with the scanned page
  • the example script converts to pdf and uploads to a windows file share
• use a fast high end HP or Fujitsu (or other SANE supported) scanner with a sheet feed

Requirements

• bash
• python
• sane / scanadf
• ghostscript (for ps2pdf)
• netpbm (for pnmtops)
• imagemagick (for convert, if using monochrom)

Similar

• http://icopy.sourceforge.net/ - Similar idea, Windows only, not headless

Installation

• git clone https://github.com/stan3/papscan.git

• copy config.sh.sample to config.sh and customize

• start the application on a tty from init

  • for traditional init add something like this to /etc/inittab c7:3:respawn:/sbin/agetty -n -l "/path/to/papscan/initscan.sh" 38400 tty7 linux

  • with upstart copy /etc/init/tty6.conf to tty7.conf and use exec /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty7 -n -l /path/to/papscan/initscan.sh

  • with systemd have a /etc/systemd/system/papscan.service something like this

      [Unit]
      Description=papscan
    
      [Service]
      ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty -n -l "/path/to/papscan/initscan.sh" 38400 tty7 linux
      Type=idle
      Restart=always
      TTYPath=/dev/tty7
      TTYReset=yes
      TTYVHangup=yes
      TTYVTDisallocate=yes
      KillMode=process
      IgnoreSIGPIPE=no
      SendSIGHUP=yes
    
      [Install]
      WantedBy=multi-user.target
    

• (optional) use chvt (part of kbd) to switch to the right virtual console on boot e.g. put /usr/bin/chvt 7 in rc.local