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

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

#221

Post by redisman »

cpach wrote: post #198
NoSorryCannot wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Same here. Mine is from Brother, probably their cheapest laser printer. No hi-res colour display or any fancy stuff like that. But it just works.

Exactly. Works amazing, no 3rd rate touchscreen experience. No badly made apps I have to install on all my devices. Just does what I want it to and nothing else.

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.

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

#222

Post by manyxcxi »

sleepybrett wrote: post #182
manyxcxi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got into it specifically because you can get good printers cheap. There is a manufacturer that offers an open source based printer that was better than it had any reason to be for less than $300. 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…

Nothing like a extruder that is not user serviceable and only prints PLA. When I was told that my office went through several of those extruders, I took some year end left over funds and purchased a lulzbot (Taz5). As far as I know that thing is still doing the work they need it to do.

Luckily the Replicator 2 and 2X were when MakerBot was still trying (or pretending) to be open source. The hotends were standard-ish MK8 (or 10). Everything was pretty serviceable on them as long as you didn’t need to fix the motherboard.

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.

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

#223

Post by lallysingh »

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #214
jfengel wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also a saying that "Anybody can build a bridge that stands up, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands up". The 2,000 year old aqueducts were massively overbuilt, not because they wanted them to stay up forever but because they didn't know how to make them stand up for 20 years without building in a factor of 100 safety margin. Our aqueducts won't last 2,000 years, but we built them for a…

Tell that to the cities who see their infrastructure fall apart after 20 years and can't finance rebuilding it stronger and cheaper.

How little infrastructure works they have if they had to pay for it to be 1000x overbuilt?

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

#225

Post by Jon_Lowtek »

lallysingh wrote: post #223
Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to the cities who see their infrastructure fall apart after 20 years and can't finance rebuilding it stronger and cheaper.

How little infrastructure works they have if they had to pay for it to be 1000x overbuilt?

there probably is a middle ground. Just because i disagree with the rather radical opinion that claims it's most efficient to just barely fulfill minimum requirement and that throw-away & buy-new should be considered for civil engineering doesn't automatically mean i favor the radical extreme opposite opinion.

I am just stating the very obvious problem.

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

#226

Post by na85 »

_liww wrote: post #210
jfengel wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also a saying that "Anybody can build a bridge that stands up, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands up". The 2,000 year old aqueducts were massively overbuilt, not because they wanted them to stay up forever but because they didn't know how to make them stand up for 20 years without building in a factor of 100 safety margin. Our aqueducts won't last 2,000 years, but we built them for a…

Got any evidence/examples for that, where the cost of building for 100 vs 1000 years has been worked out?

One of the pyramids at Giza was built over the course of 20 years by tens of thousands of slaves.

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.

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

#227

Post by payne92 »

floatboth wrote: post #215
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.

Put a different server in front of it instead of letting it hang on the network by itself? 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 thought about that. The real issue I’m running into is page rendering time: I think the processor on it is only 50 or 80 MHz, and modern software generates some pretty elaborate print files.

I’ve been meaning to explore server-side rendering, but haven’t got that far down my todo list.

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

#228

Post by payne92 »

zdw wrote: post #142
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.

They stopped manufacturing the HP LaserJet 4000 over 21 years ago, and the jetdirect EIO network card (J3111A) not long after that.

If there is a newer network card or firmware that supports this printer, I’d love to hear about it.

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

#229

Post by WWLink »

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…

To be fair, my home printer is a Canon MX860. I bought mine around 2009 or 2010 and it has wifi, an LCD (albeit not touchscreen) and the only time I've experienced a jam, I was trying to print on sketchy paper anyway.

The best part is, the ink tanks for it are dirt cheap. Like $20 for 4 complete sets of ink tanks on amazon.

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

#230

Post by enobrev »

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 have a monochrome home laser printer from about 5 years ago that I'm happy with.
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