Tell HN: How to Make Use of Your Amazon Smart Sticky Note Printer
The Amazon Smart Sticky Note Printer is one of those weird devices that on the one hand uses standard protocols (IPP), and on the other was seemingly never meant to work outside of the associated proprietary apps. In case you who missed it, it is a networked 80mm thermal printer that comes with (slightly) sticky paper. What it is actually meant to be used for is anyone's guess.
IPP, BTW, is Internet Printing Protocol. Most modern networked printers supports it, and pretty much all of those support some open format to transport the document itself. Format support, and that IPP tells you the settings it can apply, is what makes a printer "driverless".
Despite this, many printer makers till ship drivers for no obvious reason. But i digress, back to the ASSNP.
Even though it shows up as a network printer (at least on Linux, Mac and Android), it remains useless outside of Alexa and the app "Jotting Up" (by the OEM Knectek).
Why is this? The ASSNP reports that it supports "image/pwg-raster" - which is the most open format for IPP printers there is. But that is a lie - Knectek confirmed this themselves. No wonder regular printing clients have a hard time making use of it.
But what does it support then? Apparently it supports a format that is unique to Knectek: "image/reverse-encoding-bmp". This is a mspaint-flavored bitmap, but upside down (arguably BMP is upside-down, and this is right side up). It also has to be exactly 576 pixels wide.
For example, it can be realized with ImageMagick like this: convert some_image.png -resize 576 -monochrome -colors 2 -flip BMP3:output.bmp
Then, send that to the printer like this: ipptool -tv -f output.bmp ipp://<ip-of-printer>/ipp/print -d fileType=image/reverse-encoding-bmp print-job.test
If you go experimenting with IPP, just make sure to use the good old Print-Job operation. The ASSNP lies about supporting Create-Job and Send-Document operations too.
You should be able to use the ippfind command to discover the printer ip address, but it's quite flaky. (Configuring the printer to connect to WiFi still needs the Alexa app, but surely that can be solved eventually)