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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

I want to buy a printer but I want it to simply print what I tell it to (which indeed is exactly how it should behave). What can I do?

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We got open source 3d printers you can build at home __before__ open source regular printers that you can build at home

How come?

2-d printing is a hard, boring problem and many people increasingly print very little, especially hackers.

While most of the printer is pretty simple mechanically and electronically, inkjet heads and laser drums are going to be beyond the ability of most home hobbyists. Even dot matrix heads would be pretty complicated to fabricate with lots of tiny precise parts.

I don't think this is the reason because someone could harvest the heads from an existing printer and make everything else open source.

It genuinely seems that a 3D printer is easier to build; the precision and resolution required is significantly less than for photo-quality (or even document-quality) printing, right?

Previous discussions on hackernews (see this comment [0]) claim that the paper handling hardware is part of the problem. It's apparently quite difficult to do reliably (thus all the 90s jokes about paper jams) and all the known solutions are locked up under patent

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37007815

I wonder if part of that problem could be solved by going back in time, and printing on something like the accordion-folded paper favored by dot-matrix printers, or even a full roll of 8.5 inch wide paper that then gets sliced into 11 inch long chunks after the ink is applied?

Then we just have to solve all the other problems :)

Truly high-speed printers do that.

Think of the printer that prints out all the Chase credit card statements for millions of customers. It uses a "roll to cut sheet system"

Example: https://offtechne.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Roll_to_Cut...

I kinda don't buy patents at this point. There were very decent printers in 90s and those have any patent expired already.

Because people aren’t okay with manual feeding, print times in minutes to hours, and 0.4mm resolutions on printed text.

open source plotters that fulfill these requirements do exist. Commercial solutions are just far more mature and accessible for printed text.

The commercial printers are fine for all normal uses and absurdly cheap. Ink, less so.

Whereas 3D printers are a niche tech for tinkerers; playing with building the printer is as much a part of the fun as actual usable output.

Because no-one, especially the kind of person who's into open-source, uses printers often enough for the problems to bother them, and because the existing commercial products are highly optimised and effective.

Even if nobody is building a printer from scratch, I'm surprised there isn't some kind of open source firmware project (like there is for, say, digital cameras) just in order to avoid all the driver nightmares people complain about.

Digital cameras have a stable(ish) lens interface, so people use a smaller number of models for longer. Consumer inkjet printers are so cheap and change so often that there is no single model that's popular enough for people to coalesce around (and people who do care about e.g. a printer that works well on Linux will research and buy one that's known to work well on Linux - printers are pretty much a commodity, whereas people have strong feelings about their camera hardware and want to use a particular camera with different firmware instead of changing cameras)

Monochrome laser printers don't have tracking dots.

(* That I have seen evidence of.)

I wonder if a pen plotter could replace a BW printer, probably adequate only for certain types of documents.

Buy Fuji Dimatix print heads and build your own.

Good luck with your currency counterfeiting.

I'm curious how long it has been since an even half-way convincing fake could be printed on a home printer (even if it were totally unlocked). My guess is quite a while. Maybe you could do it for small denominations that don't have color shifting inks, but I'm pretty sure that paper that even sort of approximates the feel would make it not economically viable, even on a home printer.

The reason most of it gets detected is that it doesn't succeed at being half convincing.

Yeah, that was my point: these rules aren't really preventing counterfeiting, because even if you were allowed to print currency on a home printer, it wouldn't work, because it would be trivially obvious as fakes. It sounds like you are saying that making trivially obvious counterfeit bills is still possible, which seems like it even further supports the fact that these rules aren't very useful.

There's only like ~55 billion us banknotes in circulation (according to uscurency.gov). It wouldn't surprise me to find out that banks' counting machines scan each of them, and put the serial number and location into a database, and that database flags bad serial numbers and things like "this serial number is also claimed to be in a vault 1000 miles away" - causing the bill to be flagged, set aside, and turned over to the secret service.

The working set of data needed for this type of thing could probably be stored in a couple TB - small enough to be in a single (beefy) server's RAM.

Such a database could be sharded out insanely easily, too. Rather than having 1 BEEFY server with a couple TB of RAM, you could do a couple dozen servers with a more modest 256 GB, with each server having a strictly defined subset of serial numbers (ie, one server could handle notes with serial numbers ending in 00 or 01, another handling 02/03, etc.), and the load balancing becomes extremely simple.

If, in our current world, the only reason you see for privacy is to commit a crime, then the shame is on you.

In our current world, I don't see a reason to own a printer.

If there is someone sending out printed communications that needs that level of security, and wasn't committing a crime, I'd love to hear about it. Because it'd seem like they'd have to completely avoid the mail system, leaving fingerprints, or licking the envelope.

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