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I recently bought an old Brother laserjet for 100 bucks off Craigslist. The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get th

by RajT88 4y ago

I recently bought an old Brother laserjet for 100 bucks off Craigslist. The guy thought he was scamming me, because the autofeed tray didn't work. I'll get that fixed in due time. But the manual feed tray which still takes a stack of 15-20 pages works fine. The bigger issue is my wife tells me I can't drill another hole for an Ethernet jack for it and have to make it wireless...

cute_boi 4y ago
You can make it wireless by adding some router and link two wifi if you want :)
cricalix 4y ago
Do you need it to be available over wireless for direct printing, or just on the network without making holes? If it's the latter, are you aware of Ethernet over power (aka powerline networking)?
- RajT88 4y ago
  Yep. Tried that long before we bought the printer; won't work here. And yes, it's the latter - no holes. I settled on trying one of these things or similar: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014SK2H6W https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014SK2H6W
ashton314 4y ago
Have you looked at things like power line adapters? I’ve got one and it works brilliantly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication
- password4321 4y ago
  Also MoCA (coax) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_over_Coax_Alliance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_over_Coax_Allianc...
- RajT88 4y ago
  Powerline does not work in my home for reasons I can only speculate. It would take hundreds of dollars of tooling to figure it out. To the gent suggesting Moca - an option generally, but no coax in the office. I think a pi or small wireless bridge will probably be the way to go. Or I will talk my wife into letting me drill another hole in the floor.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    A pi with CUPS installed will work fine.
Anarch157a 4y ago
A RaspberryPi sharing the printer over the network would do the trick. Stick it to the back of the printer, the LAN port connected to it, while sharing overthe WiFi. It works for 3D printing with OctoPi, it should work with 2d printers with Samba.
squarefoot 4y ago
I have a Ethernet only Epson WP4515 that I plan to keep until it dies since it works perfectly with 3rd party cartridges. In order to add WiFi, years ago I took a TP-Link TL-MR3020 mini router I got for €5 at a flea market, put OpenWRT into it and set it up as a wireless bridge. Worked perfectly for years until I could finally put the printer in a place to connect it through Ethernet. Any piece of hardware with the necessary features (compatible with OpenWRT or any other Linux, Ethernet, WiFi) can be used, therefore many *Pi-like boards will also work, but repurposing an old router/AP will be the cheapest solution since they're often literally thrown away.

by RajT88 4y ago

cute_boi 4y ago

You can make it wireless by adding some router and link two wifi if you want :)

cricalix 4y ago

Do you need it to be available over wireless for direct printing, or just on the network without making holes? If it's the latter, are you aware of Ethernet over power (aka powerline networking)?

RajT88 4y ago
Yep. Tried that long before we bought the printer; won't work here. And yes, it's the latter - no holes. I settled on trying one of these things or similar: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014SK2H6W https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014SK2H6W

ashton314 4y ago

Have you looked at things like power line adapters? I’ve got one and it works brilliantly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication

password4321 4y ago
Also MoCA (coax) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_over_Coax_Alliance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_over_Coax_Allianc...
RajT88 4y ago
Powerline does not work in my home for reasons I can only speculate. It would take hundreds of dollars of tooling to figure it out. To the gent suggesting Moca - an option generally, but no coax in the office. I think a pi or small wireless bridge will probably be the way to go. Or I will talk my wife into letting me drill another hole in the floor.
- kube-system 4y ago
  A pi with CUPS installed will work fine.

Anarch157a 4y ago

A RaspberryPi sharing the printer over the network would do the trick. Stick it to the back of the printer, the LAN port connected to it, while sharing overthe WiFi. It works for 3D printing with OctoPi, it should work with 2d printers with Samba.

squarefoot 4y ago

I have a Ethernet only Epson WP4515 that I plan to keep until it dies since it works perfectly with 3rd party cartridges. In order to add WiFi, years ago I took a TP-Link TL-MR3020 mini router I got for €5 at a flea market, put OpenWRT into it and set it up as a wireless bridge. Worked perfectly for years until I could finally put the printer in a place to connect it through Ethernet. Any piece of hardware with the necessary features (compatible with OpenWRT or any other Linux, Ethernet, WiFi) can be used, therefore many *Pi-like boards will also work, but repurposing an old router/AP will be the cheapest solution since they're often literally thrown away.