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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?

#241

Post by Rebelgecko »

na85 wrote: post #226
_liww wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obv…

For reference, the Bass Pro Shop pyramid in Memphis cost around $100m. The largest pyramid in the UK cost the government of Qatar over half a billion dollars

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

#242

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

#243

Post by wegs »

adwn wrote: post #54
wegs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is quite right. An open source 2d printer would allow for a lot of things commercial printers don't allow for. For example, I'd like to be able to print on things which are not paper. If I had an inkjet head mounted on something, there's a ton I could do with it, from modifying it to print directly on fabric, to integrating it with other fabrication technologies to make decorated objects. Even a CN…

> An open source 2d printer would allow for a lot of things commercial printers don't allow for. For example, I'd like to be able to print on things which are not paper. Those kinds of printers already exist commercially. The argument is the same: Printing on clothes or PCBs might be cool, but crappy DIY printers that can do that are even more niche than crappy DIY printers that print on paper.

I think the argument is that $200 crappy is better than $2000 commercial for a lot of uses.

If I'm labeling pins and parts on a PCB, I'll take low-quality labels over no labels any day. If I'm labeling how wood fits together on a laser cut, I'll take it. If I'm making educational resources, quality almost doesn't matter.

If I could have a 1980-era printhead I could control, I could do a lot with it.

And if we had that, quality would improve with time. Look how many years it took 3d printers to be useful for anything practical. I expect if we started even with 1980-era inkjet quality, we'd get to nice in 5-10 years.

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

#245

Post by teddyh »

wolrah wrote: post #133
teddyh wrote: post #36

I wish that the intelligence in printers would migrate back to the computer. Having printers with their own complex formats (PCL, PostScript, etc.) only makes them inscrutable and lends itself to proprietary competing formats and printouts which never gets quite right. I think the original NeXT machine was on the right track with their simple bitmap-only laser printer, where the PostScript processing was done on the…

That's interesting that you feel this way, personally I take the exact opposite position. I want printer drivers to be a thing of the past. I just want to pass the printer a file that represents a document and let it handle things for me. Some kind of standard format, probably something in the Postscript/PDF family tree. Likewise for scanners. I want to just have a HTTP API or something like that where I just "GET" a…

> I just want to pass the printer a file that represents a document and let it handle things for me. Some kind of standard format […]

…like a bitmap? Turning documents into bitmaps is easy to do in the computer now. We’re a long way from the time when (due to limits on memory, processing, and bandwidth) you had to encode your document into a complicated command language which you could send to a printer.

> […] the scanner hands me a file in some reasonable format.

Like a bitmap?

I really don’t see how you’re disagreeing with me, here.

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

#246

Post by mpweiher »

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…

> Do you remember printing in 2000?

I remember printing on my NeXT Laser Printer in 1992 or so. Great experience, fast, reliable, high quality output.

Rare the pages that did not come out at rated engine speed.

Canon engine, tweaked to 400 dpi instead of 300, with the host doing the rendering in DPS (anyone remember machportdevice?) and a custom DMA interface delivering the bitmap directly to the engine IIRC.

No interfaces on the printer itself, no ports, no Wifi, no LCDs, no memory, nada. And none needed. Printer is for printing.

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

#248

Post by minot »

sparkling wrote: post #65
dsr_ wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick a Brother that has all of the following features: BR/Script (their PostScript emulation) ethernet duplex And you will be fairly happy. If any of those are missing, you're buying an inferior line.

Thanks, i'll look into it. I currently have a Samsung laser toner (M2026W). I bought it because its farily compact and blends in to my little home office corner in the living room. The duplex machines tend to be a bit larger, a pitty. Printing - when it works - is pretty good, just the WiFi is extremly unreliable and i end up having to re-configure the WiFi from scratch by connecting via USB and using some proprietar…

> just the WiFi is extremly unreliable

do you have an option to use an Ethernet cable?

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

#249

Post by payne92 »

zdw wrote: post #233
payne92 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 620n and 635n EIO cards support Bonjour: https://h10057.www1.hp.com/ecomcat/hpcatalog/specs/provision... and http://www.hp.com/ecomcat/hpcatalog/specs/provisioner/99/J79...

Awesome, thanks! I didn't realize that the newer EIO cards were so backward compatible.
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