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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?

#81

Post by Inhibit »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #11
detaro wrote: post #6

Printers are cheap and widely available, which leaves a DIY printer which is going to be slower, more error-prone and more expensive as a very niche idea. There is a clear benefit to buying or building an open hobby 3D printer, whereas that's harder to argue for a 2D one - while there is a lot of crap around, there's enough workable choices, aftermarket inks/toner works, you likely won't be modifying/tuning a 2D prin…

I also wouldn't underestimate the challenge of moving paper. I once spoke to someone who worked for Kodak (or a similar company - it was a long time ago) who said that they acquired another printer company purely because their paper moving technology was excellent and it would have taken years to develop an equivalent quality of engineering internally. This was before the present day race to the bottom in the printer…

Having taken apart a color laserjet to repair the paper uptake I agree. That was a lot of engineering to make sure the paper moves through the path repeatably.

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

#82

Post by gonzo41 »

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 fiddly problem.

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

#83

Post by pjmlp »

lillecarl wrote: post #68
pjmlp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of FOSS consumers only care about free beer, hence the uptake on MIT like licenses.

If you remove FOSS from the sentence I believe you more.

If I take FOSS from the sentence, then piracy also counts and those don't care about the code in any form.

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

#84

Post by adyer07 »

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…

You could look into the IBM Selectric - the typing element is a ball so it can't jam, and it's actuated by little cables that might be hackable. Feed it paper off of a roll, and you have your jam-free, continuous printing solution :)

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

#85

Post by felipemesquita »

I don’t think the nozzle would have to be open source for this to be useful, just a printer that can be modified to print on things other than paper and be cool about whatever cartridges you put it it would be great. Inkjet cartridges are a little messy, but easy to refill at home, whit the printers DRM like check’s being the main issue. This project reverse engineered cartridge control and developed an ESP32 controlled hand held printer: http://spritesmods.com/?art=magicbrush&page=3

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

#86

Post by kevstev »

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…

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 that I really need any- I just want them to print)- since 2000.

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

#87

Post by ryankrage77 »

teknopaul wrote: post #26
teknopaul wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big point about OS for me is hackability what if instead of printing ink on paper you want to print fungi spores on jelly.

or names on birthday cakes. cutting guides on wood. UV paint on metal. Jokes on toilet roll :) thinking there might be mileage in this idea. clearly a mod from a 3D printer design would be where to start. standardise ink delivery / modules for different materials with different characteristics. A standardised printer driver for Linux and other platforms would get a lot or re-us.

Attaching a ballpoint pen to a 3D printer/CNC machine/laser cutter seems like a good start. It would be low DPI and slow, but fine for drawing and larger text.

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

#88

Post by timonoko »

yrro wrote: post #76
timonoko wrote: post #56

I have Samsung CLP-310 Color Laser Printer from 2008. It was the last one ever, which you can force-reset so it does count how many times a color cassette been used. I can refill those cassettes from half liter buckets from ebay for €10. It is just incredibly reliable. One and only problem is that only the XP-windows Samsung printer drivers work truly well. But I have 2008 laptop for that.

I used the open source foo2zjs driver with this printer successfully for quite a while in case that's helpful.

Various Linux drivers work quite ok on text and cartoons. But the Samsung Windows XP driver has some special magic to make perfect photographs. Not even Samsung's own Linux drivers can do that.

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

#90

Post by Nbox9 »

kevstev wrote: post #86
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…

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 fantastic. I know this isn’t about toner on page, but having wifi connection, an LCD touchscreen interface, and them generally being a little smaller has made the experience better.

The only thing that was better about printing in 2000 is that back then printing was more useful because so many people wanted paper copies.

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