And the Dyesub printer train continues

The Shinko/Sinfonia CHC-S2145 driver and backend are functionally complete, though bugs remain with the auxiliary commands. I must say it's nice seeing the printer spit out one of my photos in only few seconds, knowing that I wrote much of the driver code. The auxiliary commands work, but there's still something wrong with my handshaking since the printer hangs after the response comes back.

I still have little idea as to the printer error codes, but I found some docs via google that at least enumerate the various errors that are displayed on the printer's LCD screen.

Today I distracted myself a bit and spent some time reverse-engineering the spool format and printer protocol used by the Sony UP-DR150. I committed the initial cut at a backend, and if it turns out to work, I'll go ahead and add that to Gutenprint as well.

I find myself wondering if I should just unify all of those disparate backends into a single 'gutenprint-usb' backend that handles everything. I'm already up to five backends, and that number will only grow.

While all the backends basically do the same thing, there isn't very much directly common code, and trying to genericize the almost-but-not-quite common bits will make things much more complex without really buying us anything. That said, presenting the system with a single executable may be the right way going forward.

The Sony UP-DR200 and DNP DS40 may soon gain improved support as well.

In other news, I had a report of a crash with the CW1200 driver when trying to use Monitor mode. Unfortunately in the process of moving I seem to have lost all of my serial cables -- so I can't get a console on my development board and recreate the crash in a full debug-enabled environment.

I need to do something about this ASAP.