I'm a student, and I don't have a job yet, so if you like my repo, please consider
to gift me a cup of coffee
PyWSD
Web Services for Devices (WSD) tools and utilities for cross platform support.
Documentation
You can browse the documentation on readthedocs.io.
Abstract
The Web Services for Devices is a set of specifications aimed to handle network communication between devices which offer some kind of functionality or need to signal events. There's a discovery protocol, a way to retrieve a list of services from endpoints, and a set of rules built on top of XML/SOAP messages over UDP for commands/events.
Windows uses WSD as a way to discover and interact with a wide range of printers and scanners nowadays. Other WSD applications are less-known, but this project aims to cover the standard with a generic set of tools suitable even for those devices.
Linux and Mac OS users everyday have to deal with a not-so-good (or absent) full support for printers/scanners. For example, Canon does not support Linux at all, and distributes bugged drivers that are not fully open source, nor integrates well with existing and coherent Linux printing and scanning frameworks. Device-initiated operations are not supported at all. This is going to change: WSD standards are not well-known, but fortunately they are documented, and easy to reverse-engineer if needed.
So my idea is to get a good comprehension of the protocol, implement a draft library and a set of associated tools in python, then test it until the implementation is mature. The natural next step will be C implementation, that will finally enable the SANE and CUPS wsd backends implementations.
A library for simulating/implementing new WSD devices could also be developed, and it would allow seamless integration of devices shared from a linux instance and a Windows-enabled client, for example.
Developer notes
Required python version: 3.6
Docstring style complies IntelliJ PyCharm suggestions
Project status
As you can see, I'm the only developer. I need people to test my library, develop tools from it (some demo bits are among the modules, but they're just for on-the-fly debug while developing).
Here's the list of targets for now:
- Python library for scanners (70% done IMHO)
- C library for scanners
- SANE backend for scanners
- Linux daemon for device-initiated scans