I’ve always thought it was interesting we have open source 3D printers but with how often 2D printers break and how expensive ink is no one has made an open source 2D printer. It’s nice to see some progress in this field
I often wonder why people think they have to start from scratch and build an entire printer. Few people’s printer problems are printer problems. They’re usually problems engineered into the printer at the firmware level. The stuff that actually does the printing is dumb components that do whatever you tell them and mechanical engineering someone else has already done for you. Right down to the commercially available connectors that connect the dumb components to the broken-by-design control board.
Why remake the entire printer instead of just the control board?
Not to mention, you can add features that should be there on every printer but that no manufacturer has considered including. Like an emergency stop feature for when the printer gets a corrupted print job and starts printing out as many blank pages as it can with the occasional page with a single line of gibberish. Tell it to stop, and it actually stops and spits out whatever sheet of paper it’s working on at the time. No holding down the power button. No clearing the jam that results. No uselessly canceling the job at the source. No questions asked. Just stop printing, clear the paper path, ignore the rest of the job, and lie your ass off and say you finished the job so no software gets any funny ideas about resending it.
The project hasn’t even launched yet. So I’d say that it is not an “is a” situation but rather a “might be a” sort of thing.
Inkjet… I’m out.
Actually kind of a necessity.
With an inkjet, most of the ‘difficult’ engineering and manufacturing is in the print head. The rest is just a basic x/y bot to move the head and paper around- easy engineering and manufacturing. They use someone else’s print head so they get around all that. That makes this a fairly easy design- just figure out how to trigger the cartridge nozzles when the head is in the right spot, write some code for rasterizing the image into print strips, and you’re done.
With a laser, there’s a lot more work. You need an entire optical system (laser, spinning mirror, etc), you need high voltage stuff to charge the drum, you need a high wattage heating coil for the fuser, etc. There’s a lot more engineering and coding work involved and more manufacturing also.
yeah but they get dried out and waste ink if youre not a frequent printer
Everyone knows that, but the comment you replied to explains why anything else just isn’t feasible.
thank you, representative speaking on behalf of everyone, for telling me what the comment i replied to says
- I want to shit out gold instead of turds
- sure but that’s not possible
- yeah but I could be rich
- ok dumbass
- thank you, representative speaking on behalf of everyone …
what if you only shit a tiny amount of gold, and had to sift that out of daily turdage?
what percentage would still send you back into gold-panning the turds of what you ate yesterday?
these are the questions that keep me up at night.
Probably not that much I guess.
I mean if you could net $200 or so per hour of turd sifting I’d be game with the economy the way it is and all.
Bring back dot matrix printers and continuous feed paper!
My thoughts exactly when reading the headline.
So close, yet so far…
Definitely not a perfect machine, but a giant step in the right direction,
Exactly stop looking at it as a bunch of faults, look at it as a proof of concept. The bubblejet ink – I’m sorry, the inkjet bubble – will pop eventually!
“Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 [Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike] license for all of its files,”
That isn’t an open source licence…
While the firmware could be using a classic software license, in the hardware world these licenses don’t mean much. Afaik Creative Commons licenses are what’s generally used for open hardware
Non commercial means nobody else can sell it, so even if you print one for a friend you can’t legally recoup the costs from them
This would be allowed from my understanding of the license. You are not gaining commercial advantage or monetary compensation from “selling” it at cost to your friend once
So your friend buys all the components and a case of beer (or non alcoholic equivalent) and asks you to help assemble it?
Freaking awesome start! I will revisit this when it gets to laser printing.
0 chance for DIY laser from scratch. 0 Chance for LED without someone’s printhead.
Those printers contain a lot of high-precision custom stuff that you can’t replicate without a substantial lab.
re: laser printing - the tech has been functional since the 70s. Honestly I don’t see it as fundamentally more ‘high precision’ than inkjet heads that require similar tolerances. It’s not as easy as their path, sure, but it’s hardly impossible.
I think the trick to both will be using already proven components on the market and encouraging third party ink, toner, print head etc manufacturers to supply an open source project, and it’s kinda in their interests imho…
hopefully this project succeeds and other avenues open.
0 chance in what time frame?
Until the death of humanity or the point at which we get molecular 3D printers.
You need a high enough intensity light at 300 LEDs per inch to knock some electrons around on a sheet of perfect plastic. Then you need a perfect source of toner, the moving the paper bit and the melting bit are the only parts we can do adequately.
To make it outside of a fabrication facility simply isn’t reasonable. It’s too small.
Its the same reason we’re not going to be making our own desktop monitors.
The only reason they’re able to pull this inkjet off is because the head is coming from a fab, we don’t have that kind of precision at home to make a inkjet head.
Well I’ll be damned. I had just recently made a comment about how open source printers have been hard to make due to all of the challenges associated with aligning the paper. This is an absolutely genius solution to the problem! Gonna have to plan on getting one of these.
Tons of 2d printer challenges.
The ink jet head at a resolution of <50um (as opposed to 3d printing resolution of usually >200um)
Combined with printing on many different surfaces and such: cardstock, printing paper, glossy, weights, stickers, etc…
This project “cheated” (I mean that not in a negative way, tons of open source hardware projects use proprietary components, my own does too for now) by using a proprietary ready-mades printhead, which saves the most cost and effort of the whole machine, and is the component that causes the most issues, generally.
I definitely want to try this out too.
Can you elaborate on the paper alignment challenge? Why is it difficult to do and why this roll solve the problem?
Getting the printer to pick up a single sheet off a stack of .003” thick sheets at a variable depth, and then dealing with variable sized-sheets, rotation, paper jam detection to avoid burning out motors, just to name a few. Things get even more complicated with things like 2-sided printing.
If it was just one of these at once, it might be pretty approachable, but the classic and convenient 8 1/2 X 11” paper tray that modern printers have is a genuine challenge to manage without lots of careful communication with all the different parts.
First, I always appreciate the effort for creating open systems:
and it’s entirely open source — bar its off-the-shelf print heads and ink cartridges.
…but the cartridge is usually the worst offender of commercial implementations for a number of reasons.
…leading companies including Brother, Epson, and Hewlett-Packard to implement a range of restrictions in hardware and firmware in an effort to lock printers down to their specific first-party cartridges.
The Open Printer, its creators claim, won’t do that — although it’s based around off-the-shelf Hewlett-Packard color and black ink cartridges with built-in print heads, the tiny microfluidic nozzles of a high-resolution inkjet being a little beyond the realm of do-it-yourself hardware. These cartridges, which can be third-party compatibles or refilled originals, are installed in a cartridge board driven by an STMicroelectronics STM32 microcontroller — which is, in turn, connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer acting as the central brain of the system.
So they’ve built their own driver for the cartridge which is good as it would prevent the vendor from denying the use of third party or expired first party cartridges from operating. There’s still the expense of acquiring the first party cartridges, and the questionable quality of third party/refilled to contend with.
Unless this thing forgoes that stupid print code that puts yellow dots on each page to identify you when you print stuff like every other printer out there, it isn’t worth the hassle.
It’s open source. So even if it had it you could remove it.
What’s this? I’ve never seen yellow dots on stuff I print
Edit: looked it up, intresting and definitely a bit disturbing from a privacy perspective. Particularly that it was kept secret until 2004.
theyre microscopic. theyre typically used to track printers doing illegal stuff (e.g counterfeiting) and leak tracking if someone when to scan some document and post it somewhere it shouldnt be. Of course, this is antithetical to privacy. The yellow dots are microscopic throughout the page.
It’s only common on color laser printers.
You can’t. They’re microscopic.
actually that’s only for laser printers - inkjets don’t have tracking dots
This isn’t entirely correct.
https://office-watch.com/2017/secret-printer-tracking-dots/
Generally they are not found in lower end budget inkjets, but are found in higher end ones.
Reliance on the HP cartridges maybe a mistake as HP wants to cut 3rd parties out and sell direct to customers via subscription.
This is so awesome!
Now make that with a continuous ink system.
I once worked at a place with a fancy printer that didn’t use cartridges and instead used blocks of wax that could be continually fed into it. It took 20 minutes to start up and warm the wax up to the point it could be used as ink, but I thought it was a nifty idea. They’re called solid ink printers if you’re interested in looking them up.
Yes, called sth like Tektronix Phaser, and I seem to remember some big company bought the patent…
So… Basically the same principle as 3d printing (melt the printing medium, send it through an extruding head that directs it onto a surface in a desired pattern), but just in 2 dimensions, and with a different printing medium? Neat.
Have the patents expired? I’d assume InkJet is older than 2005
I love this! If its reasonably priced I’d go for one.
I’m wondering about the price too. Feel like we see someone trying to do this every few years and most of them tend to fall apart when someone figures out how much it will cost to do it effectively.
This one seem to have kept it very simple though. Not exactly a new idea but simplifying paper feed with the continuous roll & cutter idea might be genius.
That rules. I wonder what the print speed it, and if they’ll be a way to use toner carts
Not a super complicated device, but toner would be a very different tech stack, probably not.
