now do laser. fuck inkjets
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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Inkjets are actually really fascinating technology. If you squint a little it's like a CRT monitor that sprays ink instead of electrons. But for the average consumer they're just not worth it except in niche situations. I have a black and white ~~inkjet~~laser printer. I printed a page for the first time in 7 months yesterday. It printed perfectly the first time. No print heads to clean, no dried ink, nothing. It just works. Hard to compete with that.
was it plugged in and doing head maintenance all those 7 months?
Sorry I meant laser
So, if I take an old CRT, fill the tube with ink and squint outward, will I get an inkjet printer?
Well if you don't it means you didn't squint hard enough.
a lot in garbage bin
Looks like the use-and-throw cartridges philosophy of companies is backfiring, making it easier to make an Open Source one.
They'll probably try to sue for reusing their stuff.
But I guess, now I get another reason why picking out of trash is criminalised in the US.
As JustEnoughDucks said, this is pretty "cheated".
Specially the cartridge part, which I considered to be the main barrier to entry.
In fact, the main reason I went through the article was to find out how they managed ink delivery.
Hopefully someone tries that part too.
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.
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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.
I believe the idea is you would refill the original cartridge. You can get refill ink and a type of syringe to put ink back into the original cartridge. Those have been available for a while.
Definitely not a perfect machine, but a giant step in the right direction,
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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.
That's a really good idea. Something like OpenWrt but for printers would be amazing.
It's funny, they have their own hardware now. Maybe starting with a open source printer firmware would eventually lead to open source printer hardware.
See, I was thinking replacement boards on the grounds that printer manufacturers have a lot more financial incentive to make firmware flashing difficult than router manufacturers do.
The last thing you mentioned is something that HP did Implement some years ago into their (at least one of their) printers.
Wow. I figured no one would ever do that.
Course, then you're stuck with the rest of the problems HP engineered into their printer.
That printer is in fact quite solid. No bullshit like forcing you to buy their ink, no batshit proprietary shit, doesn't break that often etc. Only problem it has is, that when you try to scan something it sometimes happens that quite a lot of colourful stripes appear on the document.
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.
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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.
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