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Comment by brcmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Why is there no open source printer or hacker friendly printer?

Surely Eric from Pebble should focus his energy on that.

Because the paper and ink handling mechanicals are even less common than say PC grade electronics which are largely commoditized for an ecosystem of multiple designers. Eg Framework or MSI etc can design and build motherboards in the ecosystem. But, print engines afaic aren't design components packaged for multiple design partners.

it's crazy that 3d printers are so hackable but 2d printers are malicious spyware machines with no alternatives

The government has their tentacles in them to make sure the microdots are printed. They're trying to lock down 3D printers too in NY state.

> They're trying to lock down 3D printers too in NY state.

Good luck with that. Unkess they inspect every single vehicle and delivery entering the state they could only make it a little less convenient and force a few more people to buy a kit instead.

Solution: put colourful pens into 3d printer "hands"

This unironically may be what needs to be done.

A video by Stuff Made Here covered what is essentially one such machine [0].

That specific machine is meant for generating handwritten notes, but I imagine it could likely work for general purpose documents too with some tweaks.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=cQO2XTP7QDw

It seems weird because back in the 1990s there were a bunch of companies combining e.g. Canon print engines with their own RIP. But now everything has vertically integrated?

There's near zero money in printer hardware. Ink is what makes money. So few people are printing nowadays that it's effectively a dead-end industry. It's not new, there's very few innovations in printing lately (other than ink tanks but even then, that's not that new). You've been able to print over wifi for a while now and have had access to some sort of cloud printing service for just as long. I could see some hobbyist wanting to develop their own printer but I doubt any manufacturers would sell them a print engine, there's not enough money to even bother replying to an email. Maybe I could see something where you piggyback onto the controller board and run your own software but that's likely such a niche market. Who cares enough to do so? Firewall your printer off and use printers that support generic drivers and can take generic ink (or can be tricked into doing so), you'll save a lot more time than building your own printer that you'll use twice a year.

> Ink is what makes money.

IaaS (Ink as a service). /s

I see you have not bought an HP printer lately: https://instantink.hpconnected.com/us/en/l/v2

Since we're beating up on brother in this thread, here's brother doing the same thing: https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/subscription-info

I'm surprised that HP hasn't shuttered Instant Ink because of the terrible PR they get from people that don't understand how the service works, subscribe for a month for $3, then are all Surprised Pikachu when they cancel the service and they can't use the ink anymore.

Because as much as we like to complain about consumer hostile printer companies, modern printers are marvels. Reliable, excellent print quality, and fast and all that for very inexpensive prices.

If selling printers was a business with decent margins, you would find a lot of Chinese white label printers doing more for less.

If you can limit yourself to vector graphics, there are inexpensive open-source pen-plotters which use the same Arduino-based grbl program that is used by CNC drilling machines. I don't know how reliable they are, and I don't know of one with an automatic paper-feed, and they probably take long to draw, particularly if there are a lot of solid color areas. Looking on amazon I see a cheap A4-sized self-assemble pen-plotter for $130.

We should make a dual-head pen-plotter / paintbrush combo, to fill in solid colour areas faster.

Making a reliable paper feed is surprisingly difficult and requires construction with tiny tolerances.

Not to mention that if you tried to re-invent it yourself, there's a good chance you'd end up violating a patent. Even if you didn't, HP or some other company could allocate a lot of legal funding to convince a judge that you have.

Because printers are ungodly complex to make

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