A while ago, I needed a printer and scanner for the first time in quite a few years. I remembered reading an article on The Verge a while back that recommended Brother laser printers as the way to go for the most hassle-free experience. After looking around for a bit, I ended up getting a Brother MFC-L2750DW for very cheap on eBay Kleinanzeigen (basically Germany’s version of Craigslist). While I’m generally very happy with the device — it’s got WiFi, AirPrint, duplex printing, and mostly just works — it does not support scanning to a network share or scanning to email. I thought it did when I researched it, but the manual is actually for a few different models and the note that says that mine does not have those features is easy to miss.

So, no scan-to-share or scan-to-email. What it does have, however, is something called “Scan to PC”. This is a proprietary mechanism thought up by Brother, which allows you to scan from the Brother device to a companion app running on your computer. It uses a proprietary protocol to advertise the PC to the printer and to then send the image data back to the PC. Thankfully, someone has already done the work of reversing the protocol and building an open source implementation called brother-scand.

Brother-scand is designed in a way that allows you to configure an arbitrary number of targets to advertise to the printer, and to set up a separate program to run on the data received from the printer for each of those targets. Each target — called a preset in the config file — shows up as a menu item on the printer. The application ships with some example configuration files and scripts and getting it to work was reasonably straightforward, though it did take a bit of tinkering.

In particular, you need a few different programs installed on your machine to successfully process the data sent by the printer — convert it to PDF, run OCR on that, send emails, and so on. I’ve packaged up all of those dependencies into a small Docker container that should be able to perform most scan-to-share and scan-to-email functionalities. The app itself works well in a Docker container, though it does need a small patch to deal with not seeing the printer-visible external IP address of the host.

I run brother-scand on a small home server and it’s been pretty solid so far. Sometimes — rarely — it needs a restart. But I use it a few times a week to either scan something to email, scan it into a Samba share, or to send it directly to paperless-ngx.

See the README in the repo for a more in-depth guide on how to configure brother-scand.