8 ms·

Retro-Printer Module

100 points by rwap 4y ago

rwap 4y ago
Launch of a small Raspberry Pi HAT which captures data from centronics ports, and emulates an older dot matrix printer to allow for e-printing and printing on modern USB / network printers. Ideal for extending the working life of older equipment, particularly where the existing printer is no long made, or there is a need to move to electronic paperwork.
rcarmo 4y ago
Genius.
snvzz 4y ago
This is yet another reminder that we very much need an open source hardware printer. If there was one, everybody in the planet would buy and recommend that one, over the tyranny which are proprietary printers. RMS started GNU over a fight with a printer, and we STILL haven't progressed.
- detaro 4y ago
  I very much doubt it would be very popular, unless it also somehow would manage to be extremely cheap. If it's not extremely cheap, there is enough proprietary competition that also works just fine in general, and a usefully open design (i.e. one that's indeed reproducible etc) would probably be even more expensive. (The same with a lot of hardware: lots of people say having an open version is very important ... until it comes to making any compromise when actually buying one)
  - xypage 4y ago
    The trick is that an open hardware printer would likely have much cheaper cartridges, and typically people spend much much more on the ink than the printer. So even if the printer comes out as more expensive they can price gouge less on ink and still come out as the economical choice
    - detaro 4y ago
      People that buy printers for printing a lot already optimize for that though, and thus buy printers with cheap ink/toner. And inks and their formulation are a big hurdle for a good open design: Either you pick some off-the-shelf vendor ink at whatever that costs, or you now also need to specify and enable ink production.
      - prmoustache 4y ago
        Most people would be happy with black and white printer for home and I don't think ink formulation is that much a hurdle in that particular context. Home printing is mostly driven by: - children asking for coloring pages to their parents - quickly copying/printing documents for admin stuff Both do not need color. Any time a professionnal and colored output is needed, most people turn to professionnal copy/printing services.
        detaro 4y ago
        So the target to beat is a ~100$ laser printer with a ~$0.04 per page materials cost then.
        bluGill 4y ago
        Most people would save money by sending they print to a nearby store and paying $.20/page. Sure in theory the printer they have at home is much cheaper, but for the amount they print vs the life of a printer in reality their printer is much more expensive. Plus they can choose color (extra cost), photo quality (much higher cost, but quality they can't get at home) when they want it.
  - RobotToaster 4y ago
    Open source designs can end up extremely cheap, when dozens of Chinese companies start manufacturing them. Exactly that happened with 3d printers.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    >unless it also somehow would manage to be extremely cheap. It doesn't have to be cheap. It needs to be durable and easy to repair (e.g. by being modular, and largely 3d-printable). It needs to use standards (IPP, postscript and so on) and thus not require specialized drivers. It needs to be able to run on cheap and easy to refill/replace cartridges, be it ink or toner. Hell, I'd even take ink tape and dot pin. Just no DRM bullshit to deal with.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      If it's solely printing ASCII text, an open source daisy wheel printer would be mechanically easy to build. You could even make the daisy wheels swappable to allow different character sets.
      - userbinator 4y ago
        You could even make the daisy wheels swappable to allow different character sets. You made me imagine a pan-Unicode daisywheel set the size of a bookshelf, and a printer that swaps them while printing, like a CNC machine. If only one had enough time and money...
        HideousKojima 4y ago
        I'm picturing old tape drive robot arms like this one: https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/16/19/1462894749-ibm-tape-bot.gif https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/16/19/146289...
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Most of modern printer and scanner technology will still be under patents, and a lot of the components used (e.g. nozzles) won't be available for third parties. In contrast, e.g. in the camera industry, the situation is different - you can at least integrate commonly available sensors e.g. from Sony into your designs. Another issue is that printers are bulky, which means either a lot of very expensive plastic modeling tooling or a lot of equally expensive, questionably accurate and time-consuming 3D prints for the frame, and they are high-precision machines with very VERY low tolerances, further complicating manufacture. There are only so few but so large printer manufacturers because designing a printer is a lot of upfront work that can only be recouped by sheer mass of sold units.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I’d be perfectly happy being able to purchase a LaserJet 4 or similar beast forever. At nearly 30 years old any relevant patent must be dead. But those things were beasts and ate power accordingly. When mine warmed up you could almost hear the local nuclear plant groan.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    and a lot of the components used (e.g. nozzles) won't be available for third parties Many inkjets use combination cartridge-printheads and you can buy ink cartridges freely (even if they're overpriced.) https://spritesmods.com/?art=inker&page=2 https://spritesmods.com/?art=inker&page=2
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Whoa. Thanks, TIL. I had always thought that the printheads had their own brains!
- userbinator 4y ago
  2D printer, to be precise; there's already plenty of open-source 3D ones. I'm fine with open firmware, since it can be adapted to whatever existing hardware is available.
- theamk 4y ago
  The problem is that there are many kinds of printers... The cheap printers are "good enough" now -- there are plenty of brands which do not care about reported ink/toner levels, nor about whether the cartridges are genuine or not. Get one of those, and it is good enough for you home. (As for RMS's specific problem with printers -- "report paper jam status" -- this has been solved long time ago). So what would be your motivation on new firmware for the home printers? As for large office models, those are definitely more complex and their firmware could be buggy and could use a fix or two. But there are so many models, and each one is so expensive, it is simply unlikely to get enough users to develop an open source firmware. And even if we get open firmware for one of those, how many users will it get?
  - snvzz 4y ago
    I use a monochrome laser. It was really cheap (<$100, over 10 years of service now). But back then it took serious effort to find it, a needle in a stack of cursed printers. And, today, I couldn't get the same printer anymore, as it was a Samsung, and their printer division ended up being sold to HP, which is infamous for nasty practices with printers and DRM.
    - tonyarkles 4y ago
      Brother probably has a similarly priced option with similar reliability (I've got an HL-2270dw that was apparently released in 2012). I likely had the same Samsung you're referring to for years and years... ultimately the rollers wore out and, well, trying to replace the rollers on a $100 printer seemed like a wasted effort.
      - snvzz 4y ago
        ML-2855ND if curious.
- woleium 4y ago
  Surely we can find ine thats using FOSS illegaly and do what we did to the netgear wrt-54g on it?
jawadch93 4y ago
[dead]
LeonM 4y ago
My first project ever after completing my embedded engineering degree was building an interface like this. It was for medical washing machines that are used to clean/sterilize endoscopes. After each run, the machine would print a report containing temperatures, etc, that would have to be analyzed by the medical staff to assess if the endoscopes were safe to use on patients. I designed and build an interface board for LPT to an ARM SBC (Raspberry Pi didn't exist yet, IIRC). And wrote some C code that would convert the line levels to characters, and output it to a TCP connection. On the other end of the connection there was a server which would store and parse the output of the washing machine. This allowed us to develop a simple green/red indicator via a web interface, so all staff could see it, without having to physically get the piece of paper that would have been printed. Pretty neat experience as a first-ever project for an employer. And even getting paid for it! I just checked the website of the company I build that interface for, and they still sell it! :-) All in all, I'd guess that it took less than 1 week (40 hours) to develop.
pifm_guy 4y ago
Bear in mind that this will work for many bits of parallel port equipment, but won't work for everything. Some things use very precisely timed signals, as short as a few microseconds, and that simply can't be recreated by software over USB without hardware support.
- blueflow 4y ago
  The parallel printing protocol is synchronous in both directions. Both the Computer and the Printer will wait on each other. Edit: s/port/printing/
  - pifm_guy 4y ago
    But not everything uses that. Some software simply connects a pin of the port to a motor and another to a sensor, then uses software in the computer to turn the motor off as soon as it sees the sensor be activated. Devices that do that often have very tight timing requirements - since original 1990's era computers could respond to a change in a pin change in as little as a few clock cycles.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      This. The parallel port is pretty much the original GPIO.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - akiselev 4y ago
    It’s synchronous but it was offloaded on to the southbridge in Intel/AMD CPUs so you could fill a ring buffer and it’d DMA everything to the peripheral without interrupting the CPU. Drivers could just leisurely fill up those ring buffers and never have to worry about kernel scheduling inhibiting hard realtime. As an input the interrupt could also drop into a driver much faster than userland software. CNCs with MachCNC software and lots of old industrial equipment operated this way since it saved money on custom PCB designs. BART [1] still buys older motherboards with parallel ports wired to the south bridge because USB adaptors can’t guarantee timing and swapping to a PCIe card would require rewriting some old stuff. However it has to be done at the driver level, it wasn’t Postscript or GCode or something like that, so I doubt this piece of gear will be anywhere as useful as parallel ports used to be. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884814
dukoid 4y ago
Shouldn't USB-to-Centronics adapters / cables be listed in the alternatives section?
- joshu 4y ago
  Read it more closely. It is a centrionics input, pretending to be a printer.
  - dukoid 4y ago
    Thanks!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Roark66 4y ago
Marvellous, but why raspberry pi? I suppose this project was started before 2021. Today there is little sense to be using them for anything new (unless you're doing it just for yourself and you already have few lying around). Basic functionality such as gpio, networking etc is well documented on rockchip based alternatives (made by pine, radxa, orange etc) I haven't played with allwinner boards, but I hear they are similar. The only thing I woukd choose rpi for today is perhaps for its hdmi/composite video out and camera interface(that too can be had on alternative boards today).
- soneil 4y ago
  A lot of those alternatives have adopted the pi's form-factor as a loose standard, so there's a reasonable chance this is going to work on many of those alternatives. We're almost starting to reach a point where Pi is being decoupled from Raspberry, in much the same way PC was decoupled from IBM. We don't need to lose the Pi ecosystem just because the RPF won't sell us theirs.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  While availability of new pi4 is complicated, you can easily find them on the second hand market as well as myriads of 2, 3B, 3B+ and zero variants. Also, as said by previous answer, many alternatives have the same gpio.
  - rwap 4y ago
    Yes, we have also tested the HAT and software on Odroid C1 and Banana Pi. The problem is that you need to have one of each SBC to compile the software and test it - some of the GPIO pins do not match the Pi scheme, so have to be remapped. We managed to secure a bulk supply of Pi 3B+, so that suits our market.
- dark-star 4y ago
  I have several other "RaspberryPi-like" SBCs. Rockchip, Pine, Orange, you name it. While all of them still work fine and some are indeed more powerful than the RPi (or have more features), my biggest complaint with them is Linux support by the manufacturer. Many of them run a custom 4.x kernel that requires vendor patches that were never upstreamed, and sometimes the Websites / Downloads for these special kernels don't even work anymore. Yes, these are older boards (4+ years), so maybe this has changed recently, I don't know So for something that is facing the Internet I would be very reluctant to use them. For something internal, they're probably fine though
qiqitori 4y ago
Came across something similar for the Arduino a while ago: https://github.com/boriz/CentronicsArduino https://github.com/boriz/CentronicsArduino That said, I'm quite sure there could be a small market for products like this, especially if it could come with professional support. Good luck!
userbinator 4y ago
An open source solution has been around for a while: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/USB2LPT/lpt2usb.en.htm https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/USB2LPT/lpt... https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/LptCap/index.en.htm https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/LptCap/inde...
- rwap 4y ago
  Yes I am aware of those projects - you then need to write the software to emulate the printer itself, which interprets the control codes. We felt it was better to have a HAT which sat on a Raspberry Pi (or other SBC), so we can offer an all in one solution which is portable, rather than sending the data to another PC via USB.
sleepybrett 4y ago
mmm chunky.

100 points by rwap 4y ago

rwap 4y ago

Launch of a small Raspberry Pi HAT which captures data from centronics ports, and emulates an older dot matrix printer to allow for e-printing and printing on modern USB / network printers. Ideal for extending the working life of older equipment, particularly where the existing printer is no long made, or there is a need to move to electronic paperwork.

rcarmo 4y ago

Genius.

snvzz 4y ago

This is yet another reminder that we very much need an open source hardware printer. If there was one, everybody in the planet would buy and recommend that one, over the tyranny which are proprietary printers. RMS started GNU over a fight with a printer, and we STILL haven't progressed.

detaro 4y ago
I very much doubt it would be very popular, unless it also somehow would manage to be extremely cheap. If it's not extremely cheap, there is enough proprietary competition that also works just fine in general, and a usefully open design (i.e. one that's indeed reproducible etc) would probably be even more expensive. (The same with a lot of hardware: lots of people say having an open version is very important ... until it comes to making any compromise when actually buying one)
- xypage 4y ago
  The trick is that an open hardware printer would likely have much cheaper cartridges, and typically people spend much much more on the ink than the printer. So even if the printer comes out as more expensive they can price gouge less on ink and still come out as the economical choice
  - detaro 4y ago
    People that buy printers for printing a lot already optimize for that though, and thus buy printers with cheap ink/toner. And inks and their formulation are a big hurdle for a good open design: Either you pick some off-the-shelf vendor ink at whatever that costs, or you now also need to specify and enable ink production.
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      Most people would be happy with black and white printer for home and I don't think ink formulation is that much a hurdle in that particular context. Home printing is mostly driven by: - children asking for coloring pages to their parents - quickly copying/printing documents for admin stuff Both do not need color. Any time a professionnal and colored output is needed, most people turn to professionnal copy/printing services.
      - detaro 4y ago
        So the target to beat is a ~100$ laser printer with a ~$0.04 per page materials cost then.
      - bluGill 4y ago
        Most people would save money by sending they print to a nearby store and paying $.20/page. Sure in theory the printer they have at home is much cheaper, but for the amount they print vs the life of a printer in reality their printer is much more expensive. Plus they can choose color (extra cost), photo quality (much higher cost, but quality they can't get at home) when they want it.
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  Open source designs can end up extremely cheap, when dozens of Chinese companies start manufacturing them. Exactly that happened with 3d printers.
- snvzz 4y ago
  >unless it also somehow would manage to be extremely cheap. It doesn't have to be cheap. It needs to be durable and easy to repair (e.g. by being modular, and largely 3d-printable). It needs to use standards (IPP, postscript and so on) and thus not require specialized drivers. It needs to be able to run on cheap and easy to refill/replace cartridges, be it ink or toner. Hell, I'd even take ink tape and dot pin. Just no DRM bullshit to deal with.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    If it's solely printing ASCII text, an open source daisy wheel printer would be mechanically easy to build. You could even make the daisy wheels swappable to allow different character sets.
    - userbinator 4y ago
      You could even make the daisy wheels swappable to allow different character sets. You made me imagine a pan-Unicode daisywheel set the size of a bookshelf, and a printer that swaps them while printing, like a CNC machine. If only one had enough time and money...
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        I'm picturing old tape drive robot arms like this one: https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/16/19/1462894749-ibm-tape-bot.gif https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/16/19/146289...
mschuster91 4y ago
Most of modern printer and scanner technology will still be under patents, and a lot of the components used (e.g. nozzles) won't be available for third parties. In contrast, e.g. in the camera industry, the situation is different - you can at least integrate commonly available sensors e.g. from Sony into your designs. Another issue is that printers are bulky, which means either a lot of very expensive plastic modeling tooling or a lot of equally expensive, questionably accurate and time-consuming 3D prints for the frame, and they are high-precision machines with very VERY low tolerances, further complicating manufacture. There are only so few but so large printer manufacturers because designing a printer is a lot of upfront work that can only be recouped by sheer mass of sold units.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I’d be perfectly happy being able to purchase a LaserJet 4 or similar beast forever. At nearly 30 years old any relevant patent must be dead. But those things were beasts and ate power accordingly. When mine warmed up you could almost hear the local nuclear plant groan.
- userbinator 4y ago
  and a lot of the components used (e.g. nozzles) won't be available for third parties Many inkjets use combination cartridge-printheads and you can buy ink cartridges freely (even if they're overpriced.) https://spritesmods.com/?art=inker&page=2 https://spritesmods.com/?art=inker&page=2
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Whoa. Thanks, TIL. I had always thought that the printheads had their own brains!
userbinator 4y ago
2D printer, to be precise; there's already plenty of open-source 3D ones. I'm fine with open firmware, since it can be adapted to whatever existing hardware is available.
theamk 4y ago
The problem is that there are many kinds of printers... The cheap printers are "good enough" now -- there are plenty of brands which do not care about reported ink/toner levels, nor about whether the cartridges are genuine or not. Get one of those, and it is good enough for you home. (As for RMS's specific problem with printers -- "report paper jam status" -- this has been solved long time ago). So what would be your motivation on new firmware for the home printers? As for large office models, those are definitely more complex and their firmware could be buggy and could use a fix or two. But there are so many models, and each one is so expensive, it is simply unlikely to get enough users to develop an open source firmware. And even if we get open firmware for one of those, how many users will it get?
- snvzz 4y ago
  I use a monochrome laser. It was really cheap (<$100, over 10 years of service now). But back then it took serious effort to find it, a needle in a stack of cursed printers. And, today, I couldn't get the same printer anymore, as it was a Samsung, and their printer division ended up being sold to HP, which is infamous for nasty practices with printers and DRM.
  - tonyarkles 4y ago
    Brother probably has a similarly priced option with similar reliability (I've got an HL-2270dw that was apparently released in 2012). I likely had the same Samsung you're referring to for years and years... ultimately the rollers wore out and, well, trying to replace the rollers on a $100 printer seemed like a wasted effort.
    - snvzz 4y ago
      ML-2855ND if curious.
woleium 4y ago
Surely we can find ine thats using FOSS illegaly and do what we did to the netgear wrt-54g on it?

jawadch93 4y ago

[dead]

LeonM 4y ago

My first project ever after completing my embedded engineering degree was building an interface like this. It was for medical washing machines that are used to clean/sterilize endoscopes. After each run, the machine would print a report containing temperatures, etc, that would have to be analyzed by the medical staff to assess if the endoscopes were safe to use on patients. I designed and build an interface board for LPT to an ARM SBC (Raspberry Pi didn't exist yet, IIRC). And wrote some C code that would convert the line levels to characters, and output it to a TCP connection. On the other end of the connection there was a server which would store and parse the output of the washing machine. This allowed us to develop a simple green/red indicator via a web interface, so all staff could see it, without having to physically get the piece of paper that would have been printed. Pretty neat experience as a first-ever project for an employer. And even getting paid for it! I just checked the website of the company I build that interface for, and they still sell it! :-) All in all, I'd guess that it took less than 1 week (40 hours) to develop.

pifm_guy 4y ago

Bear in mind that this will work for many bits of parallel port equipment, but won't work for everything. Some things use very precisely timed signals, as short as a few microseconds, and that simply can't be recreated by software over USB without hardware support.

blueflow 4y ago
The parallel printing protocol is synchronous in both directions. Both the Computer and the Printer will wait on each other. Edit: s/port/printing/
- pifm_guy 4y ago
  But not everything uses that. Some software simply connects a pin of the port to a motor and another to a sensor, then uses software in the computer to turn the motor off as soon as it sees the sensor be activated. Devices that do that often have very tight timing requirements - since original 1990's era computers could respond to a change in a pin change in as little as a few clock cycles.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    This. The parallel port is pretty much the original GPIO.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- akiselev 4y ago
  It’s synchronous but it was offloaded on to the southbridge in Intel/AMD CPUs so you could fill a ring buffer and it’d DMA everything to the peripheral without interrupting the CPU. Drivers could just leisurely fill up those ring buffers and never have to worry about kernel scheduling inhibiting hard realtime. As an input the interrupt could also drop into a driver much faster than userland software. CNCs with MachCNC software and lots of old industrial equipment operated this way since it saved money on custom PCB designs. BART [1] still buys older motherboards with parallel ports wired to the south bridge because USB adaptors can’t guarantee timing and swapping to a PCIe card would require rewriting some old stuff. However it has to be done at the driver level, it wasn’t Postscript or GCode or something like that, so I doubt this piece of gear will be anywhere as useful as parallel ports used to be. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884814

dukoid 4y ago

Shouldn't USB-to-Centronics adapters / cables be listed in the alternatives section?

joshu 4y ago
Read it more closely. It is a centrionics input, pretending to be a printer.
- dukoid 4y ago
  Thanks!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Roark66 4y ago

Marvellous, but why raspberry pi? I suppose this project was started before 2021. Today there is little sense to be using them for anything new (unless you're doing it just for yourself and you already have few lying around). Basic functionality such as gpio, networking etc is well documented on rockchip based alternatives (made by pine, radxa, orange etc) I haven't played with allwinner boards, but I hear they are similar. The only thing I woukd choose rpi for today is perhaps for its hdmi/composite video out and camera interface(that too can be had on alternative boards today).

soneil 4y ago
A lot of those alternatives have adopted the pi's form-factor as a loose standard, so there's a reasonable chance this is going to work on many of those alternatives. We're almost starting to reach a point where Pi is being decoupled from Raspberry, in much the same way PC was decoupled from IBM. We don't need to lose the Pi ecosystem just because the RPF won't sell us theirs.
prmoustache 4y ago
While availability of new pi4 is complicated, you can easily find them on the second hand market as well as myriads of 2, 3B, 3B+ and zero variants. Also, as said by previous answer, many alternatives have the same gpio.
- rwap 4y ago
  Yes, we have also tested the HAT and software on Odroid C1 and Banana Pi. The problem is that you need to have one of each SBC to compile the software and test it - some of the GPIO pins do not match the Pi scheme, so have to be remapped. We managed to secure a bulk supply of Pi 3B+, so that suits our market.
dark-star 4y ago
I have several other "RaspberryPi-like" SBCs. Rockchip, Pine, Orange, you name it. While all of them still work fine and some are indeed more powerful than the RPi (or have more features), my biggest complaint with them is Linux support by the manufacturer. Many of them run a custom 4.x kernel that requires vendor patches that were never upstreamed, and sometimes the Websites / Downloads for these special kernels don't even work anymore. Yes, these are older boards (4+ years), so maybe this has changed recently, I don't know So for something that is facing the Internet I would be very reluctant to use them. For something internal, they're probably fine though

qiqitori 4y ago

Came across something similar for the Arduino a while ago: https://github.com/boriz/CentronicsArduino https://github.com/boriz/CentronicsArduino That said, I'm quite sure there could be a small market for products like this, especially if it could come with professional support. Good luck!

userbinator 4y ago

An open source solution has been around for a while: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/USB2LPT/lpt2usb.en.htm https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/USB2LPT/lpt... https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/LptCap/index.en.htm https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/basteln/PC/LptCap/inde...

rwap 4y ago
Yes I am aware of those projects - you then need to write the software to emulate the printer itself, which interprets the control codes. We felt it was better to have a HAT which sat on a Raspberry Pi (or other SBC), so we can offer an all in one solution which is portable, rather than sending the data to another PC via USB.

sleepybrett 4y ago

mmm chunky.