August 01, 2003

Scanner

Having finally given up on getting a decent scanner working under Linux (yeah, I know. Blah, blah, blah. Flames will be gleefully /dev/null'ed) I got a Canon scanner, which I'm usng on my Win98 machine.

The thing that struck me as really cool about this scanner is that it has no power supply. It is entirely powered by the USB port. Not being much of a hardware person, I guess I was unaware that this was possible.

Anyways, using it for my wine labels

Posted by rbowen at August 1, 2003 10:55 PM | TrackBack
Comments

It's entirely possible - and not unlike a standard telephone getting it's power from the phone line - but the amount of power is limited. By way of frivolous example, my force feedback gamepad is entirely USB powered, but my force feedback joystick (somewhat bigger) by the same company requires an external power source. I wouldn't think a scanner would be able to get enough power from the USB port to fire up both the light and the scanner circuitry. Go fig, huh?

Posted by: phydeaux on August 3, 2003 06:27 AM
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