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.
An laser printer is just a reverse scanner. It’s basically a resin printer with toner. We’re well past those being diy doable. It’s a couple of wires to deliver a charge to the drum and paper, a laser to remove the charge from the drum for the image, and a reservoir for the toner for the drum to pick up. The most complex part is the laser and mirrors for alignment, which is well into hobby diy territory.
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.
Necessity or not, I don’t want one. I’ve done enough IT support to know Inkjets eat ink unless they are used every few days.
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.
An laser printer is just a reverse scanner. It’s basically a resin printer with toner. We’re well past those being diy doable. It’s a couple of wires to deliver a charge to the drum and paper, a laser to remove the charge from the drum for the image, and a reservoir for the toner for the drum to pick up. The most complex part is the laser and mirrors for alignment, which is well into hobby diy territory.
Ok, well… we’re all looking forward to you publishing the repo for an opensource laser printer then I guess.
thank you, representative speaking on behalf of everyone, for telling me what the comment i replied to says
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.
are they nuggets/flakes or is the gold homogeneously integrated into the poo such that we’d need a furnace or centrifuge to remove it?
furnaces that hot are expensive is all. cuts into my gold profits
turd…nuggets…
finally that term has utility…
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.
Yeah. I can see that.
Bring back dot matrix printers and continuous feed paper!
You can still buy them. They never went away.
My thoughts exactly when reading the headline.
So close, yet so far…