In August I wrote a long post about getting my Creality CR-Scan Pika running on Linux, and one section in it had a very confident heading: Why USB Under Wine Is a Dead End. I had traced the problem down to a single unimplemented function, written it up, and made my peace with it. Scanning went over WiFi, calibration happened in a Windows VM, case closed. Then I took the scanner to the office to show it off. ...
I spent the first evening certain it was a udev permissions problem. The second, equally certain it was WinUSB. The third I spent reading OrbbecSDK.dll’s import table and finding out it was neither, and that the thing I had been trying to fix could not be fixed at all. The scanner is a Creality CR-Scan Pika. Creality ships CrealityScan for Windows, macOS and Android, and as of 4.3.1 there is no Linux build and no sign of one coming. The scanner sits on itw, the desktop I actually work on, and the alternative to solving this was rebooting into Windows whenever I wanted to scan something. That is the kind of friction that ends with you not scanning things. ...
As a German living with the country’s infamous love for paperwork, I built a streamlined Qt-based tool called DocMan to manage my scanned documents efficiently. This post explains how it works and why I created it several years ago—and why it’s still my go-to solution today without requiring any maintenance. The Problem My document workflow starts with my scanner, which connects to my network via Samba and deposits scanned PDFs into an INBOX folder. I needed a lightweight but effective way to: ...