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

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

#141

Post by NoSorryCannot » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #100

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…

> Do you remember printing in 2000? 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 :)

I've got a current model monochrome laser printer and I'm very satisfied with it.

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

#142

Post by zdw » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

payne92 wrote: post #136

Related: I have a HP 4000 with duplex, which is an absolute unit (beast) of a small workgroup laser printer. It's 20+yrs old, still going strong and parts are easy to get. 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.

See about replacing the network card on the printer, or updating its firmware. Newer firmwares frequently support Bonjour, and have various security updates.

Replaceable NIC in printers are pretty great, especially when you can buy them for 1/10th of original cost on the used market.

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

#143

Post by moonbug » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

ryanmarsh wrote: post #137

jancsika wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you stating your last two sentences as the result of researching these issues? Because as a layperson, I would not have thought a company could get a patent on clicking a button to purchase an item online.

When you read HN comments it helps to preface them with “I feel like...”

Emphasis on "feeling", because there's seldom any thinking going on.

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

#144

Post by kevstev » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

xxs wrote: post #106

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…

HP Laserjet were pretty good even pre-2000. I spent some time in publishing. And I'd compare it to nowadays paper feed on a $100-250 ink jet, that has couple of springs (id 3mm, L=15mm) that would just fail and the printer won't take paper any longer. Virtually no printer in that price range has replaceable rubber paper rollers.

Indeed- I only used 2000 as its now the last year for any patents to have been around. But all-in-ones, network printing, duplex, color-laser, were all around in 2000 and any fundamental patents on them should have expired. Wifi integration maybe not, but this seems pretty trivial to "clean room" in this day and age if this is somehow patented functionality.

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

#145

Post by scoutt » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:58 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…

> Finally, the interfacing for printers today is fantastic.

Still in the year of our Lord 2020, once a document hits the Windows Printer Spooler, good luck trying to cancel/abort it.

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

#146

Post by dirtybirdnj » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

I'm actively working on one of these right now.

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.

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

#147

Post by bb611 » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 3:00 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 2020 a top consumer or business printer will not jam on you.

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.

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

#148

Post by pwinnski » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

On October 23, 2012, I paid $133.76 for a "Brother HL-2270DW Compact Laser Printer with Wireless Networking and Duplex" and I have only ever used $12-15 third-party toner cartridges with 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.

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

#149

Post by scoutt » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 3:05 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.

While I am not printing much code lately, I do print a lot of datasheet sections that usually force me to go back and forth through a PDF, like complicated clock trees and memory maps (embedded development).

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

#150

Post by TimSchumann » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

dddddaviddddd wrote: post #51

I work with inkjet printers in research for my Masters program. I found the three blog posts about printing on this blog to be helpful: https://www.kylescholz.com/ 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…

And if you're one of the lucky 10,000 today, Bill Hammack over at the EngineerGuy youtube channel has this[0] fantastic video explaining how piezoelectric microdot printers work.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DckWNwE7R4