this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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I will throw this idea into the ether and hope someone with more time, knowledge, and talent than me builds on it: swap the brains of an HP Printer with a raspberry pi. All the motors and wiring are in place, and HP sells the printer for cheap to screw you on ink and software. You'd probably want a new source of ink and a way to refill the cartridges to fully cut out HP. I feel like this would get you pretty close at an affordable price.
The whole world wants the Linux version of a printer, we just need a couple people to get together and figure this out.
Inkjet cartridges are only refillable a handful of times before components wear out if you don't screw up the refill in the first place. I used to work at an ink refill franchise, it's all trash.
A decent toner printer and a small business that will refill toner for cheap is the way to go.
Ohh God ... That's a very, very tall order.
You wouldn't think that it's that complicated. I worked in a print-on-demand house for about 5 years, The amount of black magic fuckery that goes on between streaming data into that driver and getting stuff on the page is absolutely insane.
You're standing on the backs of like 40 years of trade secrets and poorly implemented protocols at half-assed feature sets.
And then the worst part is, HP is spent the last 20 years making the printer cheaper. Most of the inkjets don't even have steppers anymore, just DC motors and a resistive feedback ribbon.
Developing a multi-platform certified signed driver would be a pretty decent hurdle as well.
Can't we just stop printing? Change things over to black and white thermal when we really need something that's pretty easy to do.
I would love to make a living lobotomizing smart devices.
The Linux version of a printer is just buy a brother color laser (or non color). I bought one for 85 bucks like 15 years ago and it still chugging along
Please tell me more about this brother laser thingy and why it is a good alternative
Brother is probably the least offensive brand. Laser uses toner instead of ink. So no more of this not printing anything for 6 months and it no longer works crap. Toner lasts basically forever. I’ve replaced my toner cartridge exactly once in like 15 years. The starter cartridge lasted something like 5700 pages of text. The non-starter cartridge should last longer.
I work in IT. Our clients are small offices with existing equipment. So I see a wide variety of machines in different environments.
I would only buy a Brother printer. No question.
Bought a Brother during the pandemic when they were hard to get. I shelled out $500 on an office machine and I've spent probably $100 in 3rd party toner in 5 years. No regrets.
Someone could probably do this. But it would just be a fun project, not replicable.
You'd need to write your own printer driver. There are probably some open source libraries out there to do most of the heavy lifting, but it's still a project.
The big issue is going to be the interface between the pi and the printer's "motors and wiring". Doable, but too finicky to publish a "kit" or something for someone else to replicate. It could be worth the work if it would help other people, but I don't think that's on the table.
Honestly, I think anyone with the ability to do that would probably find it easier to just build their own printer.
"The motor was unable to verify activation. Please contact HP support"