The present invention relates to a peripheral control system for controlling at least one peripheral device. The peripheral control system comprises a first computer electrically connected to a peripheral device comprising a memory for storing programs and data, and a processor for executing the programs stored in the memory; at least one peripheral driver program stored in the memory in an executable file format for driving the peripheral device. The peripheral driver program comprises a DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) module; a peripheral management module (TWAIN) stored in the memory in a subroutine file format for managing the peripheral driver program, the peripheral management module comprising another DDE module for communicating with the DDE module of the peripheral driver program in standard DDE protocol; and at least an application program stored in the memory in an executable file format. The application program uses subroutine calls to communicate with the peripheral management module, and the peripheral management module uses its DDE module to communicate with the DDE module of the peripheral driver program so that the peripheral driver program controls the peripheral device according to instructions generated by the application program and passes data generated by the peripheral device to the application program.
The present invention establishes DDE conversation between Data Source software and Source Manager software in TWAIN interface. The invention primary involves in TWAIN-DDE actions which convert TWAIN operation triplets into DDE codes. Consequently, TWAIN can adapt to Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT and exist in a computer network. The invention also allows Data Source Software to stand alone for being accessed by a client application software.
The present invention describes a system and process for controlling input and output devices, in particular scanners or cameras, through application programs, where each input or output device can communicate with every application without modification of or addition to the application program and/or the input or output device software. For this, the input or output device is announced to the operating system by way of the application program as a file. The input or output device is started by means of the application program's "Open file" function. The input or output device is announced to the operating system as a drive. A data management function takes over the communication with the driver software for the input and output as well as for the preparation of the required image formats. In this way the data access functions of the application for enabling the reading of data from files are eliminated and, in addition, its own functions for accessing input or output devices through a special interface.
Apparatus for the acquisition and visualization of dental radiographic images comprising an X ray emitter device; a radiographic sensor for the acquisition of a dental radiographic image; a processing unit for storing and visualizing the image; and a communication device adapted to transmit the image acquired by the radiographic sensor to the processing unit according to a predetermined radio communication protocol; the communication device comprising a control module, which is adapted to automatically discriminate the radio communication between the sensor and the processing unit from any communication put into effect by the processing unit from and to devices and apparatuses other than the sensor and utilizing the same predetermined communication protocol implemented by the communication device.
The present invention relates to scanning multi-sided documents. The scanner device scans the multi-sided document one side at a time. The image of each side is tiled vertically or horizontally to form a composite image, which is transferred from the source to the application based on the TWAIN protocol. The source is TWAIN compliant, and it allows any TWAIN application to scan and process multi-sided cards as a single composite image. The source provides a TWAIN user interface which allows the user to select scanning parameters and options. The invention also provides a method of implementing a TWAIN source to use the document sensor on a scanner to efficiently scan single or multi-sided cards based on the TWAIN protocol. The source checks the status of the document sensor when the TWAIN user interface is displayed, and automatically starts scanning when a document is detected by the sensor.
