Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#121

Post by shiftpgdn » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:23 PM UTC

_def wrote: post #61

lpfabiani wrote: post #7

I worked for a while in the R&D department of HP printer division. As @jacquesm said, good 2D printer costs peanuts. The amount of R&D in color quality, speed and other parameters is huge. There were a lot of teams involved: mechanical, electrical, software, chemical... And because of that investment, there are thousands of patents that the big players are continuously paying each other for. It's a very old market wi…

> the money is in professional printing, ads, designers, etc. And ink cartridges

That model is juuuuuust about dead. Canon/Lexmark/HP are now all pushing megatank/ecotank continuous ink systems. I bought a Canon Pixma G6020 for printing photos and I'm super pleased with it. It comes with enough ink to do 18,000 black and white pages and 6000 full color pages. Refills are around $40 for the set.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#122

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

dimitrios1 wrote: post #94

Nbox9 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember printing in 2000? Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions. In 2020 a top consumer or business printer will not jam on you. 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 fanta…

I'm finding myself printing out code more and more these days, highlighting it and marking it up. There's just a different part of my brain that kicks in when I am able to get tactile with something.

I have gotten into the hobby/habit of printing at least one "thing" a day with artistic intent. That could be:

* 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.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#123

Post by fimdomeio » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

3d printing is exciting new tech. Paper print is way over it's most exciting times. This would make great advances in developing a open source 2d printer not be that much exciting.

And that's probably also why there's so much focus on pen plotters they look special like vynil discs. And that triggers interest.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#124

Post by mmcgaha » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

Nbox9 wrote: post #90

kevstev wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of patents? I had tank of an HP laserjet 3 in the 90s, and patent life is 20 years. For the basic functionality, they should all be expired at this point, and the limiting factor at the time was the high cost of memory and compute. 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 t…

Do you remember printing in 2000? Literally every printer was suffering from constant paper jams and other mechanical malfunctions. In 2020 a top consumer or business printer will not jam on you. 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 fanta…

In the late 90s we bought two laserjet 8000 printers that were still in use when I left the company in 2014. Outside of the regular service schedule they never required maintenance.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#125

Post by zajio1am » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

In the 80s there was DIY 2D plotter Alfi [1] for ZX Spectrum. I had and used one. This year, i visited my friends trying to run current DIY 3D printer, and funny thing is that it was plagued by similar isses like the 2D plotter several decades before.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq2fGkQO_gQ

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#126

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

2-d printing is mature, I think everyone has high standards.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#127

Post by dr_orpheus » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

Nbox9 wrote: post #96

_def wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the money is in professional printing, ads, designers, etc. And ink cartridges

Ink cartridges is only a $1B global industry [0]. That isn’t a small market, but the global printing industry, with all digital content being transferred onto any 2d mediums through automatic means is probably closer to $1T. Think about every book, every magazine, every coffee mug with a funny saying, every graphic TShirt. In the world. The ink cartridges are good money, but it’s not where the money is at. [0] https:…

It's not the main source of revenue, but for personal printing most of the money comes from selling ink cartridges. My dad used to work for a printer company and he said that on personal printer sales they usually broke even or sometimes sold at a loss. But all of that was made up with the profit margin on ink cartridge sales.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#128

Post by vekelly09 » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

gonzo41 wrote: post #82

lpfabiani wrote: post #7

I worked for a while in the R&D department of HP printer division. As @jacquesm said, good 2D printer costs peanuts. The amount of R&D in color quality, speed and other parameters is huge. There were a lot of teams involved: mechanical, electrical, software, chemical... And because of that investment, there are thousands of patents that the big players are continuously paying each other for. It's a very old market wi…

I had a burst of creative thought, thinking about getting a typewriter and hooking up a ton of actuators to it so I could just slide it an array of a document to type out. But it'd probably move to fast or slow, jam and then there's feeding it paper. 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 fiddl…

I remember it well. All of us computer hackers back in the late 1970s did something like that with a bunch of solenoids. It worked, but you got about 12 cps on a good day, and only constant width fonts. Also, if one of your solenoids was a bit sluggish it would throw off the registration of some of the characters. The advent of daisy wheel technology killed off the Selectric printers. Remember daisy wheels, especially the early metal ones??

OTOH hacking an IBM Executive might have been something. Proportional spacing!! (but a much fiddlier mechanism)

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#129

Post by marketingPro » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #75

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you 3D print a nozzle? Or are there electronics in there too?

... because the channels through which the ink is propelled are only microns wide, and the ink volumes which are distributed per drop are in the picoliter range which requires a complex piezo-electric control system.

If this topic turns out to be the start of a FOSS, I'll join as a (senior) design engineer.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?

#130

Post by mceachen » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

gonzo41 wrote: post #82

lpfabiani wrote: post #7

I worked for a while in the R&D department of HP printer division. As @jacquesm said, good 2D printer costs peanuts. The amount of R&D in color quality, speed and other parameters is huge. There were a lot of teams involved: mechanical, electrical, software, chemical... And because of that investment, there are thousands of patents that the big players are continuously paying each other for. It's a very old market wi…

I had a burst of creative thought, thinking about getting a typewriter and hooking up a ton of actuators to it so I could just slide it an array of a document to type out. But it'd probably move to fast or slow, jam and then there's feeding it paper. 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 fiddl…

> feeding paper ... fiddly

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.