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How to build a printer
- Brian_K_White 1mo agoOutstanding! This is so...correct.
- andyfilms1 1mo agoWe finally have PADDs from Star Trek!
- cat-whisperer 1mo agoWow!! I didn't think of that.
- jarboot 1mo agoThis is amazing!!! It just makes sense. And its just how you would want to use a e reader.
- cat-whisperer 1mo agoif it looks like a paper, it should act like a paper
- nomel 1mo agoYou can even fold it, once!
- cat-whisperer 1mo agoIt's also not effective against rock
- valleyer 1mo agoFunny. But... paper covers rock.
- sudo_cowsay 1mo agoJan Ken Po!
- stavros 1mo agoI've been seeing the Xteink a lot lately. Should I get an X3 or an X4? I don't really know why I want it, but I have an eInk addiction, so I just need it.
- cat-whisperer 1mo agoIt's funny that X3 is a successor of X4. Only downside is that X4 has a USB-C port and X3 doesn't
- stavros 1mo agoWhat about the back light? Are they otherwise identical?
- cat-whisperer 1mo agoX3 isn't backlit, but the battery lasts 7 days. So, it's pretty good for me
- a2dam 1mo agoI've owned all of them and the answer is the X4 Pro IMO. It has a backlight, which is the only thing I really missed on the others.
- hamaluik 1mo agoI bought an x4 a month or so ago, zero regrets. It sounds hyperbolic but it’s finally been the thing to actually decouple me from my phone. Whenever I’m out and about, bored, I just slide it out and pick up where I left off reading last. It’s a nicer reading experience on my kobo but the portability and.. frankly charm just can’t be beat.
- sho_hn 1mo agoThis is a fantastic idea!
- joshmarinacci 1mo agoI love the concept, but I wonder why he wasn’t printing to PDF. Can this device not render PDFs?
- cat-whisperer 1mo agoI was thinking of this, but rendering PDF takes a lot out of a 400KB RAM'd device. It also needs a ton of things to actually work which the ROM can't hold. Kindles have a ton of RAM, this one didn't.
- conorcleary 1mo agoI'm sure there's a super trimmed down linux pdf reader that could be ported over
- bluGill 1mo agoProbably not. It doesn't appear to have enough ram. I'm not sure the CPU is up to that either.
- ValdikSS 1mo agoPDF is very, very complicated standard which can't be handled properly on tiny MCUs with reasonable performance and spec conformance: - 4 font formats - 9 image formats - blending with transparency - different colorspaces, each image could use its own on the page - different dithering algorithms, each image with its own - the page can have elements from another pages (global elements) This is only a small part from the top of my head. Common simple home printers absolutely should not accept regular PDF as an input: thanks to Apple and IETF we now have Apple Raster and PWG Raster for printers, as a part of AirPrint and IPP Everywhere/Mopria driverless printing standards, which are very similar but have slightly different options and headers. It's a simple raster input for printers specifically. Some companies, such as HP, invented a "raster PDF": PCLm / PCLms. Don't be confused by the name, it's a regular standard-conforming PDF which contain nothing but a full-page JPEG on each page, and don't use any other features. It's created only to be able to open "printed page" (driver output) in a standard PDF viewer on a PC for debugging or business logging needs, but otherwise it's like a regular JPEG with additional per-page metadata.
- ks2048 1mo agoGood job, but I’m left wanting to know how to build a printer.
- cat-whisperer 1mo agoI'd say it's an eco-friendly printer
- tdeck 1mo agoIf a DIY plotter would do, this site has a long list of different projects https://mattwidmann.net/notes/pen-plotters/ https://mattwidmann.net/notes/pen-plotters/
- voxelghost 1mo agoWhat if I want a cabinet sized rotating head printer that can print carbonpaper triplets, sounds a machinegun, and has LP0 ON FIRE error message
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- d--b 1mo agoThere is an open source one https://www.opentools.studio https://www.opentools.studio
- zxexz 1mo agoHow is that open source? There’s not a single line of code. No CAD. Nothing. Sure, there’s a “coming soon” CrowdSupply link, which I guess is more than a KickStarter. But open source?
- d--b 1mo agoAh sorry, I thought they were already open source. They say they will open source it once they finalize the design, but yeah, not there yet.
- greazy 1mo agoI don't understand the purpose. What am I missing? The author "prints" to the eink display. Why not load say the pdf directly?
- cat-whisperer 1mo ago> I was thinking of this, but rendering PDF takes a lot out of a 400KB RAM'd device. It also needs a ton of things to actually work which the ROM can't hold. > Kindles have a ton of RAM, this one didn't.
- ghostly_s 1mo agoIt's an e-reader. According to the specs it has native support for PDF.
- mrheosuper 1mo agoIt's an esp32 MCU, even if it can somehow run the PDF render pipeline, it won't be more ideal than just accept the raw byte stream and display.
- stdatomic 1mo agoFrom the 4th line in the article: > But getting stuff onto it was tedious. I had to join its hotspot and open a little upload website in my browser. Yuck. Anyway, very creative, I like the idea a lot.
- sowbug 1mo agoI've wanted something like this for a long time to print recipes that I'm about to cook. I don't want my phone in the kitchen getting gunk on it, so I'll usually print on paper, get the gunk on the paper, and then throw it out. I'm not going to create a recipe PDF and load it on an e-reader. That's too much work. But I will happily press control-P on a recipe web page and select the eink display as the target.
- cat-whisperer 1mo ago
- NDlurker 1mo agoVery cool. I'll be updating to this fork
- cat-whisperer 1mo agoThanks. It's rough around the edges, so PRs are open, and there's a recipe in the repo if you want to build your own apps.
- ValdikSS 1mo ago>penguin would shrink the result to fit its screen. >I declared A5 and Letter paper, media type stationery, and an output bin called face-up. You can (and should!) define exact dimensions of your screen in `media-size-supported`. It will probably be a non-standard IPP name, that's why you should define that in `media-supported` as `om_NNNmmxYYYmm` or `oe_NNNinxYYYin` That way you don't need to scale the incoming data, the PC will format it exactly to the dimensions of the screen. Both PWG Raster and Apple Raster support 1-bit-per-pixel mode (instead of 8-bit-per-pixel you use), that's why the input could be 8 times less in size. Use `print-color-mode-{supported,default}=bi-level` instead of `monochrome` for that. And also tune `urf-supported`'s `W` option, use `W1` for this case. The screen/dithering could be ass in 1-bit mode, see https://github.com/OpenPrinting/libcupsfilters/pull/160 https://github.com/OpenPrinting/libcupsfilters/pull/160 where I added more dithering options (Linux-only though, Apple seems to abandon their CUPS).
- cat-whisperer 1mo agolovely, this would save me a bunch of memory during transformation and dithering. Will do!
- Neywiny 1mo agoThis is why I like it here. Somebody does irrefutably incredible work outside of their comfort zone, and somebody else goes "yeah actually I was born in that zone. Moulded by it. Here's how to improve it" (in a positive way)
- ValdikSS 1mo agoOh no, I wasn't, and that's definitely not my comfort zone. I mess with the printers and printing stack due to anger, not because I like it. It's bugs on bugs, with bugs chasing bugs! So little developers, so complex stack with 25 years of technical debt, and little community around because it's not a sexy technology to be involved in. That's why I have to dive deep and fix my bugs myself if I want to make it work properly as I would like it to. I also ended up making my own print server device, because China did not make a proper one for some reason for all these years.
- alternativeworl 1mo agoVery cool. I was expecting to learn about the ins and outs of ink, printheads etc but instead learned "How to build a paper that acts like a printer" which turned out much more entertaining.
- cat-whisperer 1mo agoglad you liked it!
- a3w 1mo agoWanted ideas on how to build an ink printer that is untraceable. For privacy reasons.
- NooneAtAll3 1mo agoI wonder why we don't see slow-but-actually-works approaches that reuse 3d-printer hardware just put a pen or sharpie on the same mechanism, no?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- nxobject 1mo agoAlas, you might have to make do with a dot-matrix printer at draft quality.
- phoenixtao 1mo ago[dead]
- e12e 1mo agoNice. I keep wondering if these devices would play nicer with DjVu rather than pdfs and raster formats? https://djvu.sourceforge.net/ https://djvu.sourceforge.net/
- namibj 1mo agoFor fast updates / high frame rate, especially also smooth fade from previous to next page, those displays only do black/white. They can typically modulate about 14 levels of gray in-between but reliably (without really bad ghosting, due to strong temperature sensitivity of the pixel's transition response and the display being static so all gray has to be done by carefully interrupting a transition part way through) only from a nice flash-to-black -> flash-to-white -> fade-to-target-greyscale (sometimes one or two alternating full contrast flashes prepended to more intensely equalize the pixels/erase ghosting, but should only be needed every couple dozen page flips in grayscale mode). I think the nice b/w no-flicker fade transitions chop the transitioning of all changing pixels into small burst/chunks and interleave/alternate the chunks of white-to-black with the chunks of black-to-white, so it's perceptually simultaneous. Or it's actually pulling off some kind of tri-state driving leaving unchanging pixels alone and pulling those that change to either plus or minus polarity depending on what transition direction they are supposed to go in... Sadly IIRC all quite proprietary-gated :( What that means for djvu is that at least for text-only content on those readers that manage the 300 dpi "threshold" you'd just rasterize to pure 300dpi black/white (1 bit per pixel) comparable to a 300dpi "don't skimp on toner but don't you dare take half a second longer than you must in order to make the text crisp enough for $reader to have no good reason to whine about it being not crisp enough" laser printer job. Djvu is particularly for displays with more than about 5bits of grayscale as well as for lossy compression of grayscale/color scans. And maybe also some efficiency gains on 1-bit-per-pixel quantized scans, but those aren't usually the target content for these readers, IMO. Might want to try for them, though!
- e12e 1mo agoHm.. I just tried on my Google pixel 7 Pro (obviously very different display - OLED) - and certainly seems like the result of a test conversion pdf2djvu should be at home on an eink screen. Not sure if there's a simple way to test on the only eink I have to hand; a Remarkable. Fwiw google Gemini cane up with the following to convert pdfs on device in termux after some prodding (koreader can display DjVu): You'll need access to storage: termux-setup-storage Then pipe/paste this to a script: (Sorry for the verbose slop) Ed: moved to sibling comment
- tapia 1mo agoIn Linux it's pretty easy to create such things with cups. A while ago I did a cups backend for my Fujitsu Quaderno A4 [1]. It is super useful to be able to just open any document, in any program that supports printing, and then just "print" it to my device. [1] https://github.com/cristobaltapia/dpt-rp1-cups https://github.com/cristobaltapia/dpt-rp1-cups
- IdiotSavage 1mo ago> any program that supports printing Unfortunately printing support seems to go out of fashion, at least in macOS land. Lately I needed a quick printout of a markdown document. I could have used TextEdit for the raw text, but I wanted the styling too. Learned that neither VSCode, Xcode nor Obsidian can print. (There is a community plugin for Obsidian.)
- rrr_oh_man 1mo agoLOL. TIL you can’t print from VSCode.
- simonjgreen 1mo agoOr Obsidian
- maybewhenthesun 1mo agoprinting has never really been a thing from text editors I think. Used to be that printing a text file was just `cat myfile.txt > /dev/lp0` . It has been a while since I printed a plain text file, but I guess there's still a similar command available with some research.
- ptman 1mo agovim/nvim at least have :print
- voidUpdate 1mo agoI've done the same from a raspberry pi to a receipt printer, just piping to lp0
- jiehong 1mo agoPretty cool work! And it’s nice to see printer discovery works through the standard mDNS! Regarding the size of the page being sent to the printer, I remember reading that printers used to be postscript interpreters and the result of that program would be the page. Perhaps that would trade ram for compute, but might be more complex in the end.
- yeasin-arafat 1mo agoEmulating a network printer to send pages to an e-ink screen is such a clever hack. Every OS already has the print dialog built in.
- conorcleary 1mo agoJust like print-to-pdf is (one of many) peeves of adobe's
- yeasin-arafat 1mo agoExactly. Anytime you can leverage a universal OS protocol, you instantly bypass the proprietary gatekeepers. Building on open standards is always the smarter architectural play.
- kitd 1mo agoGood article. One of the great things about having an open platform like the Xteink is that it should uncover loads of novel and unsatisfied use cases. Eg, this could be paired with a mobile phone to act as a secondary display much better suited to outdoor applications in bright sunlight.
- utopiah 1mo agoworking on an daily life ePub generator (because I want to stick to CrossPoint) with the opposite goal, namely use the phone as little as possible, but I admit I would also like to tinker with an additional temporary display, at least for typing
- flippingheck 1mo ago> open platform like the Xteink is that it should uncover loads of novel and unsatisfied use cases +1. And it's worth celebrating the underlying technologies that enable this: ESP32, and RISC-V. Anyone know what's needed for eink to become cheaper?
- pimterry 1mo agoThis would be a neat API for a digital photo frame - just print photos to it and they appear on the screen.
- spwa4 1mo agoAnd then maybe different pages become a slideshow.
- cat-whisperer 1mo agoyes!!
- Wilson2000 1mo agoLove this!
- tomaskafka 1mo agoI love it! Can we have "print to kindle" now? Just open pdf on mac, hit print, grab a kindle and there it is (yes, I know, we can do send to kindle, and some time later, when Jeff Bezos allows so, the doc might appear).
- stavros 1mo agoSure, jailbroken Kindles run Linux.
- ge96 1mo agoI did open the thread and didn't see an actual printer shown except the e-ink device but aside from that, I hate printers buy a cartridge it's empty after 3 prints wtf... now I just go walk into some store like Walgreens to print stuff If you like e-ink device reviews this is an artsy channel think small leather notebooks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oOqFUuULOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oOqFUuULOk For me my favorite is the RM2 but I keep selling/buying it back due to poor financial decisions but I love how it writes and long battery, plus hackable, never paid for a subscription. It is an extra device too so unfortunately not used that often I spend most of my time in front of a desktop but have multiple laptops too/drawing tablets.
- graemep 1mo agoMy 10 year old mono laser printer requires a cartridge very two years or so. This is despite being a lot more heavily used than the average domestic printer.
- ge96 1mo agoMight be a good buy, I don't print much mostly need black and white shipping labels
- graemep 1mo agoA mono laser is a good fit for that. The up front cost is higher but the cost per page is tiny.
- tredre3 1mo agoI got my laserjet secondhand 10 years ago. It was already 10 years old at this time. It's been low on toner since the beginning but shaking the toner cartridge is usually enough to get usable prints the few times a year I need it (return labels, letters). It's a great, reliable device!
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]