Scanner Trouble; or Why SCSI Was Maybe Not Such a Good Decision
So I decided to take the opportunity of the CompUSA locations near my apartment closing to buy the equipment I need to run my scanner from my year-old Mac Mini. I bought my scanner at the same time as my first post-college computer, and that’s still what I’m running it on, since in 1999 firewire wasn’t yet prevalent and I wanted a faster connection than USB between my computer and my scanner, so I bought a scanner with a SCSI connection but no USB. What this means, however, is that I can’t run it on my Mini, so I end up having to boot up the old computer and scan with that, then transfer the file via the house ethernet network to my Mini so I can work on it. Not the optimal solution!
So I went over to CompUSA to see what I could see. I found a Keyspan serial to USB adapter, and I figured that’d be fine. It had a db9 connector, though, so I got a db9 to db25 adapter as well. My scanner hooks up to the old computer via a db25 to a centronics 50 port on an old CD burner, then from another centronics 50 on the burner to a micro db50 on the scanner. It’s complicated, but it works on the G3. I hooked everything up to the Mini, and everything seems to be connected, but the scanning software can’t find the scanner. I’m wracking my brains trying to figure out what the problem is, but I just can’t find it. The serial port is active, since it’s showing up in my system profiler, but the software doesn’t seem to be able to talk to the scanner through it. I’m going crazy over this. Anyone know what the problem might be?
(I know the easy answer is to replace the scanner, but it’s a really good quality scanner [Epson Expression 800] and I wouldn’t be able to get a comparable one for less than three hundred dollars.)
I don’t know if this is still an active question, given that it’s 6 months old, but if you’re still trying to get this to work… give up. There’s no possible way to use a USB-to-serial adapter with a SCSI device: neither of the “S”s in SCSI stands for “serial”, if that’s what you were thinking. The fact that both kinds of ports can possibly use DB25 connectors is just coincidence.
USB-to-SCSI adapters do exist, but it’s questionable whether the scanner’s driver software would support anything other than a normal SCSI port (so I wouldn’t suggest buying one unless you can return it).