Apart from the nozzle why is it hard to manufacture and/or design?
Once that is said, it should be possible to work in a general-purpose open source 2d printer. The open community has achieved bigger goals. The biggest problem I can see is the entry barrier: to get a very basic printer, you have to invest thousands of time with a lot of knowledge in different areas, when a basic printer, even from the large companies, is not very expensive.
I think that one of the only chances we have for that to happen is that a company frees its designs and patents and community starts working from there.
I thought the discussion was about open source printers, not about open source printer firmware? Sure, you could probably reverse engineer the interface to the actuators and sensors, which would allow you to write open source drivers, but you'd still be stuck with the printer manufacturer's cartridges.
In addition printers contain custom specific IP blocks related to everything from ethernet to scan and print functionality. It is just not feasible for someone to be able to write custom firmware for a printer without access to the hardware documentation for these devices. More sophisticated printers even have multiple CPUs for doing various tasks.
Hordes of complains about paying for something, followed by MIT like licenses based clones.
There isn't much return or expertise on building an open source 2D printer, as opposed to 3D printers.
And ink cartridges
The ink cartridges are good money, but it’s not where the money is at.
[0] https://www.rfdtv.com/story/42630937/global-ink-cartridges-m...
I've now had 2 Pixma G series break that way, with a third well set on that course.
I have yet to get a full tank out of one, and very much regret buying them.
Although I bet I still have to send my document to it six times before it starts printing.
It'd probably be easier to make a nice block alphabet for a plotter and then just print your documents as biro drawings.
But again, feeding paper seems like a very fiddly problem.
IBM must have had this use in mind because they actually made a variation of the Selectric design that could be used as a serial terminal. We have one in storage at work but I think the mechanism is seized. Wikipedia has a surprisingly long section about modifying the Selectric to work as a computer terminal[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter#Use_a...
Daisy wheel printers were slow, loud, and had huge limits (no kerning, single typeface, no printing family photos), but the print quality was good. And if you are the kind of person who likes mechanical keyboard sounds, the sound of a daisy wheel printer is pretty cool.
OTOH hacking an IBM Executive might have been something. Proportional spacing!! (but a much fiddlier mechanism)
I had for a while a NEC Spinwriter--loud, slow, built like the proverbial tank. My recollection--it's been more than 30 years since I used it--was that it did support proportional spacing.
Printer paper came in long, laser-perforated sheets with tabs. You'd load in the start and one sheet pulls in the next.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_stationery
The crank you had to put into the front of the printer to get the steam-powered engine turning could jam in the transmission, though, and you had to watch the temperature of your coal-fired ink tank so it didn't over-boil. Those "electronic" printer guys thought they were so fancy.
"A reverse-engineered typewriter hack to make it into a printer. Using a simple MOSFET circuit and an Arduino (actually, a Light Blue Bean+ arduino compatible board), I reverse-engineered my IBM Wheelwriter 6 typewriter to print out text and some rudimentary graphics. The GitHub repository is here, and I'll continue to update it with schematics, etc., when I get some time: https://github.com/tofergregg/IBM-Wheelwriter-Hack"
Same user has a similar hack for a 1960s Smith Corona Sterling Automatic 12: https://github.com/tofergregg/smith_corona_printer
Shouldn't anything relevant have expired years ago? The first laserjet came out in 1984 it seems. Prices have come down, but I haven't seen any real innovation in printers (not that I really need any- I just want them to print)- since 2000.
The business printers in 2000 had slow processors and more ram. It was significantly bad that printing PDFs spent more time processing the file than putting toner on page.
Finally, the interfacing for printers today is fantastic. I know this isn’t about toner on page, but having wifi connection, an LCD touchscreen interface, and them generally being a little smaller has made the experience better.
The only thing that was better about printing in 2000 is that back then printing was more useful because so many people wanted paper copies.
* an anime character printed with a thermal receipt printer * a 4x6 card with an information graphic I rendered with CSS Grid * a shutterfly envelope to family in New England, etc.
most of the time I am starting with an image somebody else made, but there is a lot of judgement involved with fitting the image to paper and process -- it is a bridge between the world of digital images that I work and play in and the real world.
I go through printers the way rock stars go through guitars and what to do with the e-Waste is already part of the product.
I am amazed the the HP Officejet 6600 which just failed on me -- despite the expensive ink, the quality of the work it could do is astonishing.
It stopped picking up paper because something (like a little plastic gear) broke in the drive chain for the pick roller. To be fair all the rollers looked pretty worn -- the printer had been heavily used by a college professor. It's possible we could have fixed it but considering the cost of the next ink refill, I chose to get another printer.
If I were going to salvage the old printer I think I would go for the stepper motors, which would be great for robotics and other mechatronic projects.
---
I badly want to hack an inkjet printer to print white ink onto transparencies and then put it into a second printer to take a PNG with alpha like
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:793Nihilego.png
and make a sticker that could go in a window. Commercial kits to do this cost about as much as a good DSLR lens and they are a business expense to people who are making large quantities of swag.
It's a good market case for the "open source 2d printer" however. It's one thing to get white ink compatible with the printer, it's another thing to get the transfer function between "75% transparent" and a certain amount of ink into the printer's brain.
Assuming the printer has sufficient color resolution/depth, you could do gamma correction as a preprocessing step on the host computer. Still obnoxious, though.
The impression I get from HN comments is users of monochrome business laser printers from 2000 are the only people who are happy with their printers :)
My previous HP inkjet thing that this replaced was a complete nightmare and is in some kind of purgatory state now where it boots properly maybe 5% of the time.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/11-...
Our aqueducts won't last 2,000 years, but we built them for a fraction of the cost. They'll fall down in 100 years, but we'll rebuild them with something even stronger and even cheaper.
There is some infrastructure (bridges, sewer systems, dams) that are supposed to last longer than that. Bridges are often torn down and replaced, and it's probably more expensive than spending twice as much and having it last five times as long (again, spitballed numbers), but that's what fits in budgets. They don't want to discover that traffic patterns have changed and they need a different bridge, or no bridge at all and have to take it down.
That's becoming a real problem for sewer systems, which in a lot of places are reaching expected lifespan, and it's going to be ludicrously expensive to replace.
Incidentally, there are also reports that the Brutalist buildings are so overbuilt that they're hard to get rid of, even when they're bad (such as having insufficient ventilation). Gigantic piles of concrete will be there in 2,000 years, whether we want them or not.
Taking the (shamefully low) minimum wage in the USA of $7.25/hr and assuming your employees work 40-hour weeks with 2 weeks vacation, that's $14,500 (again, shamefully low but let's roll with it).
Ten thousand of those workers costs you $145 million per year, and for twenty years that's some $2.9 Billion.
It's pretty obvious we could build a pyramid, which is basically just a hill of rubble with worked sides, for a lot less today if we only needed it to stay up for a few years.
I am just stating the very obvious problem.
At least for the fun factor it might make sense to start with dot matrix printing. (I think it's still far superior to thermo printers ;-))
Really no comparison to modern printers in terms of reliability. I bought my last printer with 5 years guaranty upgrade. I'd ditch the printer completely if it wasn't still required for some official paperwork :/
All of that, including the interfacing are not related to patents.
It's not like there's some patent issue for using USB or wifi in your printer over whatever interface used in 2000 compared.
Or like there's a patent on using faster processor or more RAM in your printer (two things you've mentioned also).
Because as a layperson, I would not have thought a company could get a patent on clicking a button to purchase an item online.
Now that I've helped you out of the quicksand, let's do battle:
"[I feel like] it's not like there's some patent issue for using USB or wifi in your printer over whatever interface used in 2000 compared."
I could certainly try harder to finesse it, but I don't see any sensible place to insert a "YMMV" into any part of that sentence.
Do you really believe "researching" is needed?
Like, in every other domain and product category, a company can slap a faster processor and more RAM to the next iteration - as they do -, but this is somehow prevented in printers by patents?
I'd say the extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence is not mine...
> All of that, including the interfacing are not related to patents.
This seems like a pretty strong statement, can you elaborate as to why solving paper jams wouldn't involve patented IP ?
Still in the year of our Lord 2020, once a document hits the Windows Printer Spooler, good luck trying to cancel/abort it.
net stop spooler
cd *:\windows\system32\spool\printers
(remove all files in this directory)
net start spooler
That's just not accurate. I've personally dealt with truly unreasonable numbers of service calls for high end business models over the last 8 years, jams aren't frequent but they are definitely not rare.
Yes I do. No there were no "literally every printer was suffering".
1995-2000 was a perfectly fine era of B&W desktop laser printing (others can chime in about how it was before 1995). Go get some computer history education, or ask an adult in the room.
Ok, I don't know what PC stands for, but load letter means you're out of paper, please fill me up. It's not a blinking clock on a VCR.
PC: "Paper Cassette" Load: "out of paper, please load more" Letter: "US Letter size (8.5"x11")"
In some offices you'd be equally likely to see similar codes like "PC LOAD A4" or "PC LOAD LEGAL".
The LaserJet Series II and III didn't have paper drawers, but rather paper cassettes, which you could load with a stack of paper (maybe a few hundred sheets? less than half a ream IIRC), and then swap in and out of the machine as a unit.
Some models (I think it might have been an add-on peripheral for the Series II?) had two cassette slots, so you could load two supplies of paper at the same time. Either you could load the same size twice, in which case it would perform like a backup: if you ran out of paper in the first cassette, it would switch to the second cassette automatically but start flashing a light to tell you that it was time to reload the first one. Or you could load two different sizes, and it would select the right cassette to draw from based on the size of the document being printed.
The Series II didn't have a way to measure the size of the paper, so each cassette was designed for only one paper size. There was an interface where the cassette plugged into the printer which indicated which size paper it contained.
Due to the design of the paper cassette, it was very hard to tell from the outside how much paper was left. There was a tiny window but it was nearly opaque. IIRC later versions of the cassette improved this.
So if you had a model with only one cassette (which was fairly common, I think) and you loaded a "US Letter" size cassette, and it ran out of paper, the printer would refuse to print anymore until you gave it more paper. In the meantime the tiny LCD screen would flash "PC LOAD LETTER".
The printer was a workhorse and I can testify that many offices in my area were using 1980s-era Series II printers daily in 1999, when I had a part-time IT job that among other things involved doing maintenance on said printers. Replacing the rubber paper pickup roller and clearing paper jams out of the fusing unit were probably the two most common trouble cases, IIRC.
We're trained to spent much more money for business laptops and probably we should for printers, too? Well handled ThinkPads last for many years and when the hardware struggles to execute the software in decent speed they - remain to work. Lenovo (and IBM) make money with reliable hardware.
A cheap consumer printer will jam on you and tear the paper to shreds, yet the drivers are still proprietary and you still get ripped off on cartridges.
Yep, it's cheaper to buy a new crappy printer from, say, Fry's Electronics than it is to buy refill cartridges for the last crappy printer you bought that ran out of ink.
Where's my open source dot matrix?
Paper has a right-side-up, and your printing life improves drastically if you just look at the little arrow before putting the paper in the printer.
https://www.xerox.com/downloads/gbr/en/p/Paper_Guide.pdf
> As the front and back surfaces of the paper, as determined during the papermaking process, differ slightly, one side is preferred as the side to image first. The primary determinant of which side to print first is the paper’s curl characteristics.
> If you are using a quality paper intended for digital printing, the ream wrapper will be marked with an arrow that points to the preferred printing side. Print on this side when printing one side only; print this side first when printing on both sides of a sheet.
> Whether this side is to be loaded UP or DOWN in the paper tray has to be determined for each machine (and sometimes for each paper tray) by reading the system's operator guide. Once you've determined the correct orientation, marking each paper tray with a label indicating the correct loading direction helps avoid operator error and lost productivity.
> Determining Curl
> In the event a paper ream is not marked for correct print-side orientation, it may be necessary to determine the curl direction yourself. Do this by holding a 1/2-inch stack of paper by one of its short edges (refer to figure 4-2). Let the paper hang with the long edge parallel to your body. Either the lower edge or the two side edges will be curling slightly toward the center. Observe which way the edge(s) curl. This is the curl side. Load the paper into the tray such that the side opposite the direction of curl is imaged first.
> Note: If the ream had an arrow marking, it would point to the OPPOSITE side. Load into the paper tray in the appropriate direction
> Built-in Curl
> Xerox papers are manufactured with a small amount of “reverse curl,” so that they will be very close to flat after processing – this will facilitate any post-processing that needs to occur, such as binding, trimming or folding. Load according to the arrow direction for best results.
> Loading The Paper Tray
> Carefully unwrap the reams of paper to be loaded, taking care not to bend any of the sheets or otherwise damage the paper. Inspect the paper for any obvious signs of damage (bends, folds, crumpled or wavy edges, tight edges), or defects. Fan the paper as necessary to avoid sticking edges. Do not handle the paper any more than necessary.
> Load the reams into the paper tray one at a time, taking care to observe the correct orientation, as indicated by the ream wrapper arrow.
> When more than one ream is being loaded, it is important to make certain the reams are aligned atop one another. It is easy to wrinkle, bend, or otherwise alter the top sheet of a lower ream when placing another one on top of it. The interface between reams in the paper tray is a frequent source of jams. It is particularly important to avoid loading successive reams inconsistently (some arrow up, some arrow down).
> Observe the paper fill line marked on all paper trays and do not load paper above this line.
There's a bunch more there about correct storage.
The best part is, the ink tanks for it are dirt cheap. Like $20 for 4 complete sets of ink tanks on amazon.
Yes, and?
> Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions.
No. I have gone through 7 personal printers and used countless business printers. Total number of jams I've cleared from my personal printers are probably less than 10 in 20+ years.
I've cleared much more paper jams from top of the line printers regardless of their build year. Reliability of a business printer is a function of its maintenance quality it seems.
My most stubborn printer wouldn't feed some papers since they're too smooth but, it started to happen after 7 years and its feed rollers were dry and worn down at that time.
One of my HP printers started to lose cartridge calibration, made funny noises and gave strange error messages after 6 years. Looks like I've worn down its internals. It was a "disposable" model it seems. I've probably used it three times its expected lifetime.
> The only thing that was better about printing in 2000 is that back then printing was more useful
It's still very useful at a personal scale. I've also cut back my printing to save the trees but, reading articles, academic stuff and a good old technical documentation is vastly better on paper, hands down.
I remember printing on my NeXT Laser Printer in 1992 or so. Great experience, fast, reliable, high quality output.
Rare the pages that did not come out at rated engine speed.
Canon engine, tweaked to 400 dpi instead of 300, with the host doing the rendering in DPS (anyone remember machportdevice?) and a custom DMA interface delivering the bitmap directly to the engine IIRC.
No interfaces on the printer itself, no ports, no Wifi, no LCDs, no memory, nada. And none needed. Printer is for printing.
Ink delivery is likely the main challenge (although I've seen some low-res attempts), combined with the speed and precision needed for a good printer - reaching a few hundred DPI requires positioning things quite precisely. Laser printers are interesting, but then you need specialized parts like the drum that I'd expect to be difficult to produce in single quantities.
Open pen plotters are a thing, but again not typically used for normal printing duties.
Something pen-plotters don't do (they typically want paper to be placed down for them, or work of a roll of paper), and the maybe 3D-printer equivalent of preparing the print bed and removing prints from it is a well-known source of problems and manual work.
Nobody would accept a 2D printer that took manual intervention every sheet.
There's a massive growth curve too. If we could find a way to print on plastic, we could integrate this with a 3d printer and make decorated parts. I think this would be multiple stages of amateur R&D, but it would eventually happen (yes, I suspect someone will respond with all the technical issues why it can't work with current technology, ignoring all disclaimers -- I am aware this won't work right now).
I think of tons of other use cases.
I think the problem is as others have described. Making a printhead costs peanuts, but engineering one and NREs are astronomical. Ditto for paper handling, and many other parts of the printer. There used to be an printhead open enough for DIY (you could buy them in quantities of 1, and there was a spec sheet), but it's not sold anymore.
Those kinds of printers already exist commercially. The argument is the same: Printing on clothes or PCBs might be cool, but crappy DIY printers that can do that are even more niche than crappy DIY printers that print on paper.
If I'm labeling pins and parts on a PCB, I'll take low-quality labels over no labels any day. If I'm labeling how wood fits together on a laser cut, I'll take it. If I'm making educational resources, quality almost doesn't matter.
If I could have a 1980-era printhead I could control, I could do a lot with it.
And if we had that, quality would improve with time. Look how many years it took 3d printers to be useful for anything practical. I expect if we started even with 1980-era inkjet quality, we'd get to nice in 5-10 years.
You'd never run out of toner at least.
Edit, answered at least one question: yes engravers do 500 dpi routinely. Here's one: https://www.troteclaser.com/en-us/knowledge/tips-for-laser-u...
Also, high power lasers are consumables.
Then how about a printer that can print on a large wall? E.g. with spray paint.
Some of the documents that we previously received through FOIA suggested that all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable.
Given the availability and complexity, the question becomes "why bother." Microdots are an answer to that.
Then I'd ask, is there a legitimate purpose? Supposing the end goal is a totally open source chip foundry: yeah, you don't want microdots on your masks. Edit: oh god, and printers that won't do b&w without yellow dye available.
The author describes their work to make a very simple DIY inkjet printer for under $1000. While they are using a nozzle that they purchased, you can make a similar one yourself (check out the book "Microdrop generation" by Eric Lee).
All-in-all it's fairly complicated just to start printing droplets, to say nothing of scaling beyond a single nozzle or precisely moving the printhead.
It is the nozzle. Everything else is very simple to make because it is already done for 3d printers that are more complex than 2d printers(if you do not consider the nozzle).
5 years or so ago I made a 2d plotter with friends at my 3d printers community with the reverse engineering knowledge that we had about a specific cartridge with nozzles on it.
Printing with ink was easy, very easy. But we were interested in using it for 3d print wax, not so easy.
You need to manufacture nozzles, and that requires lots of money. That requires manufacturing plants. Very cheap in volume, but requires volume.
Open source has not volume in the millions, like big companies have, and those companies are not going to sell you the nozzles so you commoditize their professional field like linux did.
Find one that doesn't have a patent and reverse engineer it.
I imagine the first/original control system was extremely difficult to develop. But since the technology already exists you can reverse engineer it.
After that, you pay a supplier to make parts. In my experience, these suppliers will end up redesigning to match better with their process, but still meets critical specifications.
I'd post my contact info, but I believe I'm targeted by an HN mod.
At this point, it would be better to start looking at expired (and about-to-expire) patents. A circa Y2k printer would be a perfectly acceptable design, IMO.
Glancing back through your posts, I see pretty clear reasons why people would have downvoted your gray ones.
What you are talking about I refer to as 2.5 axis machine vs the traditional 3 axis PLA/FDM printer. Aka a plotter. Using an inkjet cartridge or a laserjet toner on a piece of paper outside the context of the printer it was designed for seems foolhardy at best... but what about moving a pen up and down?
Shameless plug, I've been working on a project called Robot Draws You! (www.robotdrawsyou.com). I'm currently using an off-the-shelf machine and the software / cloud hoops it requires me to jump through were enough to convince me to build my own machine. For the proof of concept I'm using a Duet2 board, but eventually I want to write some code that will sit on a raspi and talk to the Duet to allow the machine a more granular drip-feed style control over the "printing" process". More on that later.
"Why is it hard?" The challenge starts with taking in a given SVG file, making sure it scales / fits within the bounds of a given writeable area, and then generating GCODE to send to the printer / plotter. Because there's no extruder, custom GCODE needs to get created to take advantage of the GPIO pins to move a servo up/down to control the pen. The software challenge is replacing the much-hated cloud interface I complain about. It may suck, but it does a lot and it actually works.
The more I use "the cloud", the more I am reminded it does not provide adequate controls/info on:
- The size of the rendered image relative to the writeable area
- The order in which the layers of the file get rendered
- Information about the progress / time left per layer
- Repeatability of failed layers without re-writing entire project
So crazy me decided "I'll make my own plotter UI and hardware!" It's slow going but it's really fun and I enjoy the challenge. The end solution is going to be a mix of hardware and software that allows you to upload an SVG / vector file to a web UI, start/stop/repeat layers and control the order of the rendering. I like to make drawings of people, and also want to use this to make gigantic maps as well.
There are tons of OS boards and software already developed around this problem, you don't have to do it all yourself.
A 2D printer needs to deal with four or more liquids (ink) or fine pieces of plastic (toner). Rather than just heating the ink up, a tiny electrical current is used to squeeze out a drop at a time. Everywhere the liquid touches can get dried up, and needs to be self-cleaned. And then you have to address the color mixing algorithm, calibration, ICC profiles, etc. There are waste ink absorbers, print heads, etc. many of which involve specialty materials that can only be made in a precision factory, which would not be available for open source development.
Second, decent reproduction of e.g. text at decent DPI requires more accuracy in head positioning than what you need for basic 3d printing.
So to me it seems that the big issue is not that a random cheap standard printer would be cheaper, but rather than the home-built version is likely to get worse results than what you can get in store for peanuts.
thinking there might be mileage in this idea. clearly a mod from a 3D printer design would be where to start. standardise ink delivery / modules for different materials with different characteristics. A standardised printer driver for Linux and other platforms would get a lot or re-us.
There's 3D bitmap printers as well, like the SLA resin printers and laser sintering.
The bitmap thing at a high resolution requires higher precision equipment than a typical 3D printer which makes it more difficult to do as a hobbyist. Not impossible, but a factor.
Drawing a circle with X/Y stepper motors is more involved than you'd think. You can either resolve every step with a high resolution (command the steppers to move fractions of a millimeter at a time), or approximate the curve and let the printer do its own IK to figure out how to best represent them in real space.
Both have advantages/disadvantages. The high resolution approach can product more accurate lines, but can sometimes require more computation than the little MCU is capable of (which can cause inaccuracy of plotting as the printer fails to keep up)
The software on the printers is whatever you buy. Some of them run on available print languages that you can code up your own driver for should you really want to.
And for the example cited, cartridges, Epson had offered a more expensive printer with a do whatever you want ink setup. And Brother lasers have so far accepted any carts I use without complaint.
As for hard to manufacture the entire printer is a molded plastic to reduce cost (massively) and a fabrication plant made printhead. Mass manufacture only for the huge price-break.
When it comes to 3-d printing I see two attitudes around me:
(1) People who are involved with "making" from a blue collar standpoint think that "3-d printing is cool but the quality of the product is subpar" (2) People around the engineering department at my local Uni who 3-d print everything they can
A lot of the 3-d printing market targets type (1) and enthusiasts. If those enthusiasts were inkjet enthusiasts they wouldn't mind getting prints spoiled with an ink explosion 5% of the time.
Open source 2D plotters do exist.
But how about the openwrt-approach? Keep the printer with the good nozzle and starting with the software such a cheap printer runs, trying to get that foss first - jailbreaking your printer if you will. Or swapping the board for a raspberry pi or similar? That would at least help against closed drivers, cartridge restrictions, page counters etc.
But as others have mentioned, commercial printers are really cheap, especially for how complicated they are to replicate so there's not much motivation to make them.
BUT, it's compute bound with modern print jobs, and is missing modern protocols like Bonjour.
What if someone open sourced a legacy printer? I'd love to re-brain this printer.
Replaceable NIC in printers are pretty great, especially when you can buy them for 1/10th of original cost on the used market.
If there is a newer network card or firmware that supports this printer, I’d love to hear about it.
I have a relatively modern LaserJet that does IPP (and Bonjour) over WiFi, but it doesn't do 5GHz WiFi, it doesn't do IPv6, so I have it plugged into a server over USB instead, and the server running CUPS exposes it on the network.
I’ve been meaning to explore server-side rendering, but haven’t got that far down my todo list.
Likewise for scanners. I want to just have a HTTP API or something like that where I just "GET" an endpoint and the scanner hands me a file in some reasonable format.
The drivers are always the worst part of devices that allow computers to interact with paper, so let's get rid of them altogether.
…like a bitmap? Turning documents into bitmaps is easy to do in the computer now. We’re a long way from the time when (due to limits on memory, processing, and bandwidth) you had to encode your document into a complicated command language which you could send to a printer.
> […] the scanner hands me a file in some reasonable format.
Like a bitmap?
I really don’t see how you’re disagreeing with me, here.
The 3D printers you are talking about are very simple. Those are Fused Deposition Modeling and StereoLithography printers.
But there are also 3D printers that work like 2D printers. For example Selective Laser Sintering and PolyJet printers. Just like 2D printers they are very hard to make. Those type of printers are also not available as open source choice.
cough I'll just leave this here. Want some coffee, two sugars, right?
Point being, there are quite a few alternative use cases that commodity printers have going on under the covers that no one tends to talk about all that much. There's forensic watermarking for one but also supposedly certain features hard-coded in where if it detects it in an input, it intentionally leaves it out as an anti-counterfeiting measure. The article for that one was floating around on HN a while ago. I'll see if I can dredge it up.
Making copies is one of those things where there are several opportunities for power consolidation to be had if you look hard enough.
It's like the whole issue with 3d printing of guns. No one in an authoritative position necessarily wants everyone to have the capability to generate at will perfect duplication of information due to the consequences that spells for several entrenched, high relative value use cases.
If there was a 2D equivalent, I'd be interested in tinkering with that, too. And yes, that would probably mean spending 5x ot 10x more than a cheap commercial printer to get a printer than underperformed said cheap commercial printer. But it would be mine, and I would understand it, and be able to mess with it. And fix it if it broke. And use weird inks with it. And so on.
You can probably adapt a printhead from a printer to your 3D printer today if you want a crappy DIY 2D printer and go from there.
My printer today looks nothing like the printer I started with, I’ve switched boards, recompiled my own firmware, the whole bit. I was confident in hacking on it for two reasons:
1) It was open source based
2) Replacement parts are inexpensive
I originally started with a Makerbot 2X which was closed source and $2500 (8+ years ago). Mind you, I didn’t have one at home- we had a couple at work for prototyping.
The slicing software was atrocious, the ability to fix it was hampered by what parts they sold, and the replacement parts were generally very expensive.
My $250 printer was better in every objective measure out of the box than the MakerBot was after years of practice and tuning.
This year my friend’s 2X died and a replacement motherboard was going to be almost as much as the cost of my printer new so he just gave it to me and bought a new printer.
With my newfound confidence from my “cheap” printer, I gutted the 2X and installed an open source motherboard and completely rewired it.
It all started with a printer good enough to be liked by the community and open enough to be modifiable.
The printers after that switched to the new hotends that are not user serviceable. It boggles my mind why any home user or tinkerer would ever sign up for that crap.
BUT...
My brother in law teacher, who teaches various middle school classes and groups use them. I asked why they would waste so much money and he had a response that made it all make sense to me. He doesn’t have time to keep them all running all the time (like we had to do with the old ones) and when one goes down he gets replacement parts from MB at a discount, slaps it in, and they’re up and running again. Apparently the latest ones are fairly reliable and it doesn’t happen all that often either.
So I guess I would sum it up as not for me, but I could see why some would.
I run Linux (and on a Purism laptop so I can take it apart if I want to), so I guess I've made that choice already in a different context - "yes".
I haven't tried it, but I expect a commercial print head to be extremely specialised and adapted to the specifics of the printer it's in. And of course no documentation on what the connections are or how it hangs together. I think it'd be above my skill level to get this working.
For something as inexpensive as 2D printers to really get some interest in the 'open' world, they'd probably need to start being as obnoxious as the mobile phone market. Think changing printer languages (i.e. PostScript and PCL) in backwards incompatible ways every year or two and requiring changes to 'new and improved' incompatible consumables (i.e. ink and paper) every so often while cutting off supply to existing customers of the old consumables well before the useful life of the printer has been reached.
Requirements:
- laser printer that works with non-proprietary toners
- USB plug & play on all major operating systems
- Network printing via WiFi and ethernet
- No 2GB bloatware installation required, i dont want your shitty photo management software, just give me the driver
- Replaceable parts
BR/Script (their PostScript emulation)
ethernet
duplex
And you will be fairly happy. If any of those are missing, you're buying an inferior line.
I currently have a Samsung laser toner (M2026W). I bought it because its farily compact and blends in to my little home office corner in the living room. The duplex machines tend to be a bit larger, a pitty.
Printing - when it works - is pretty good, just the WiFi is extremly unreliable and i end up having to re-configure the WiFi from scratch by connecting via USB and using some proprietary Samsung bloatware. Horrible.
do you have an option to use an Ethernet cable?
Well, perhaps not the "replaceable parts", but that is doable with a 3D printer. I doubt Brother would come after you for printing a new output tray hinge or custom-colour button set ... and I doubt any other parts are likely to outright 'break' (my laser printers of various brands have lasted around two decades each). Any other parts, such as the image drum, would require too specialized fabrication to be done at home or at the local fab lab.
The hardware works very well. The software is weird and inconsistent. It can do some very useful things if you access the scanning function in one, incredibly convoluted way, but not in other ways. It can scan to a network share, but you have to put the password in every time. It's frustrating because it's so good and so bad at the same time.
I would love to have an open source firmware in it.
I had to buy a replacement drum unit in 2016, that was $22.59 (third party, of course).
I find it unlikely that an open-source DIY printer is going to result in something better or cheaper than what I've got.
The situation that always seems to happen to me is I need a printer ASAP. When shopping, I might find support for the Brother HL-2270DW in linux, but my local store might have a "Brother HL-2275DW" in stock (made up model number). So I'm wondering if the driver for the 2270 will work on the 2275, etc.
One and only problem is that only the XP-windows Samsung printer drivers work truly well. But I have 2008 laptop for that.
I casually poked around to see if I could find some old HP LaserJets. Do some teardowns, get some part numbers, maybe transplant a Raspberry Pi for the brains.
On the other hand, 3d printed objects may only need to satisfy overall mechanical needs, or be suggestive of the shape that they model, to serve a purpose. Most 3d printing that I've seen needs a bit of hand tooling at the end, to really be useful.
It's doable but only among a group of very wealthy hobbyists.
People with this kinda money typically gravitate towards high vacuum projects and microwave electronics
Because you can print 3D printer with 3D printer. You can make paper templates with paper template.
[1] How he started the worldwide 3D printing revolution / Adrian Bowyer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV0Tjwq7Uc0
And that's probably also why there's so much focus on pen plotters they look special like vynil discs. And that triggers interest.
GRBL Plotter Elegoo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYqx5wg4oLU
I'm afraid the answer is due to the fact that we live under a corporatocracy, and that this is the way things roll round here!
Good luck with anyone who is trying to get a open source version of whatever out there. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, I suspect it won't work out, but I have my fingers crossed for you!
I doubt I've printed out more than 100 documents in the last 20 years.
There are still a few legacy areas where nothing else will do like legal procedures and shipping labels but for the most part printers just don't seem like a broadly useful enough technology to interest most open source enthusiasts.
Imagine if everything in the world went open source. Then nobody would be getting paid, everyone would starve because they're giving away there work for free.
Most things in this world are profit oriented products produced as a direct result a capitalism. Open source is an offshoot phenomenon in software arising because software is both easier than other forms of engineering (see thousands of bootcamps) and also easily copyable.
However it should be known that most software developers need to have a job in closed source software in order to pay the bills.
Whenever you see something open source you have to know it's an offshoot phenomenon. These are side projects spawned by intense interest but ultimately still a side project to a person's main line of work which is ultimately profitable. Be surprised that there are 3D printers because it's abnormal. The fact that there are no open source 2D printers arises because there's lack of interest and because there's no profit in open source 2D printers.