A couple of years ago, I decided to invest in a high-quality scanner. The idea was to digitize and archive dozens of old photo albums from my childhood that were scattered around in boxes. You know how these projects go. Starting is easy. Seeing it through, not so much. Over the years, I’ve kept coming back to it in bursts. But year on year, I’ve been running into roadblocks. Namely, driver support. You see, what started as a functional scanner turned into a scanner that somewhat worked, and finally into a scanner that just won’t show up on my MacBook at all.
If you know me and my relationship with tech, you’ll understand why just tossing the scanner didn’t feel right. It still powered on. It still had value. But the software world had moved on, and like a lot of perfectly usable tech, it was left behind. That got me thinking. There’s got to be a better way. I had a Raspberry Pi 4 lying around that I’d previously used for a Pi-hole project. It wasn’t doing much anymore. I remembered reading that the SANE project supported a wide range of scanners, including Canon’s older LiDE series.
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