Open source printer with refillable ink, no bullshit, accept rolls of papers.
Finally an open source printer ! I dealt with so much stupidity with printers. it warm my heart.
I do have too much joy to practice mandatory critical thinking about the release of a new project. Lets talk about it? i am not the only one to be happy about it, i have no info about the price though :/
Not Open Source hardware or firmware.
License is CC-NC-SA, which fails all formal definitions of Open Source.
Curious how 3D beat 2D by, what, 10 years?
Ease really. Once the patents expired it was fairly simply to make a 3d printer, which is essentially a hot nozzle squirting plastic. It’s more akin to a pen plotter
An inkjet printer is significantly more complex. Even if you know how it works you essentially need a semiconductor level fab to make the printhead. That’s why all these projects just reverse engineer hp cartridges. Literally every inkjet printer patent could’ve expired 10 years ago and it wouldn’t change the engineering and manufacturing challenges
3D is actually 100% open source.
This still uses proprietary cartridges.
LETS GOOOOOO I have a small print shop and I only use Linux and it SUCKS
Unless you’re printing receipts in A4 width or some shit, who the hell wants to print on roll paper
Engineers, architects, Egyptian mummies.
I would, when I’m printing out a D&D map. Taping pages together isn’t the worst, but only needing to line up prints in one direction would be great.
But it’s optional, either way. Odds are I’d have sheets in most of the time and switch to roll for that, specifically, but having the option is nice, it also lets me print smaller without wasting a whole sheet.
What is actually bad about this other than it being new to you?
Roll paper isn’t ideal, proprietary cartridges are not great. I applaud the effort, but it’s all the easiest parts of the printer opened while the hard parts are left to capitalism.
Roll paper in my experience hasn’t been that bad, I think wanting non proprietary cartridges is not feasible at the moment and we can use ink bottles in them anyways so it doesn’t seem like a big deal. Its a much better very reasonable attempt that so far nobody else has really done so its worth supporting by reason to being much better than what is available at the moment.
It’s not new. It’s old.
I guess none of you are old enough to remember fax machines. There’s a reason we got rid of roll paper, it fucking sucks
I’m not saying it is new technology I am saying new to you, who now says you have used it before.
What is actually bad about this? From my experience the curl is at worst a barely noticeable affect on the paper and is less of an issue if you go through paper quick, for the people that don’t care you can use flat sheets for this printer as well.
The curl is really bad, like unusably bad, especially towards the end of the roll.
Sounds like it depends on the person then I’ve not had it be that bad in my experience, its not like that’s the only option anyways.
Have you ever used roll paper? In what use cases did you find it equivalent or superior to flat? Any problems with curling paper, see any paper waste from the core as it runs low?
Have you ever wrapped presents with rolled paper? Notice any issues with it? Think it would work well for a pile of documents?
Sounds like you’re the one arguing from ignorance here
Yes, I never found it superior except in the case of space saving protective conveinance, just not an issue in my experience, plus it sounds like the printer offers sheets as an option anyways. I’ve seen curled paper with and without coming from rolls, obviously from rolls more but its never been an issue to me. As for core waste, hopefully we are recycling our paper stack coverings and rolls.
In my experience the curling has not been an issue with wrapping paper, I just wrap it in a way where its not an inconvenience, smaller sheet would be even easier to keep flat when its sitting on something flat and with stapled together in a corner anyways.
No
Because it van print A4 ans A3 without too much mechanics
The hardware is pretty trivial. The cartridges, which are the most problematic part are HP. This is so underwhelming.
it’s still a good start . Also aftermarket cartridges exists.
oh, and also they offer refill kits.
HP carts have the printhead included, disposable, so quality will degrade fast with refilling. Epson/brother and some Canon have permanent printheads which will last orders of magnitude longer. If the cart/printhead is still going to be propietary, epson/brother printheads, which are readily available, and which can be setup pretty easily in a CISS configuration would have been way better. The project is really bad. The fact that they use paper rolls is also dumb. Are you really going to cut every single sheet? Rolls make sense for large format printing. Epson/brother with aftermarket CISS are the way to go, especially because you can get actual Epson ink in bottles for refilling, the ones used in their ecotank line, super cheap.
it also takes normal sheet paper. but it has an integrated cutter so the rolls enable A4 or A3 (us letter or 11x17), or any other length, or continuous from the same source.
permanent printheads are not really any better from a longevity standpoint. they still do degrade and need replacement. more often than not, that replacement either doesn’t exist, hasn’t been manufactured since the printer was a new model, or is prohibitively expensive and/or only available from random third-parties.
the last ink tank + separate printhead setup that you could very easily get tanks and printheads for was some old canon printers from 25+ years ago. the printheads were in a removable caddy, and that caddy was sold in stores with and alongside ink tanks.
printheads also need to be used, regularly. once you go a few weeks without printing, every day that you don’t increases your chance those printheads will never print again. when the printhead is in the consumable, it gets replaced far easier and automatically on a cartridge swap. yes, that is at the expense of higher cost new consumables.
we’ve had to bin three brothers, two hp, an epson, and a canon over the twenty years because of bad and unreplaceable printheads. coincidentally we’re currently using two salvaged hp printers that use the same cartridges as this ‘open’ printer, use refilled consumables, and the printers are old enough they don’t scream and refuse to print if the color is empty–we can use and print black only.
the problem here with this project is they don’t have their own printheads and cartridges, which means some of their code was either lifted from hp printers or reverse engineered; and they rely on hp as the only source for new consumables and printheads. hp would be very hostile to this project, so i hope they fully documented their entire process of development and are ready for the inevitable lawsuit.
The perfect color for a printer doesnt exi…
spoiler
Now do a laser printer
No more frustrating blockages like: “Cannot print in black because the yellow is empty.”
I think they’re trying to seduce me
Doesn’t that happen because of legal requirements? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
I don’t think that’s a legal requirement. Many printers don’t do MICs.
Lemme tell you it is working
I’m interested. Any info on how much it will cost?
Not yet hopefully soon
In the linked survey they’re talking about selling an ink kit. With that, the non-commerical license meaning nobody but them can sell spares, and them filing a patent, it’s almost like they’re just trying to start another printer company and just using the open source community to do advertising 🫠
I think you’re misinterpreting - the thing needs ink one way or another, and the kit suggested in the image is just a standard ink refill kit. They’re just asking if people want them to provide that, or if they want to get it elsewhere - I selected elsewhere.
HP 63 et HP 63 XL (US)
HP 302 et HP 302 XL (Europe)
HP 803 et HP 803 XL (Asie)
And the ink they use is cheap/available internationally.
I also think that one can refill these with regular ink bottles from amazon/aliexpress
What it means though is that nobody in the community can sell upgrades to the printer, sell spare parts, or, and by far most importantly, nobody can develop a fully open source printhead for this printer to sell.
Right now they are using a proprietary print head from a normal printer (understandably because it is by far the most complex engineering piece and is very complicated). However, an external team that wants to make an open hardware project taking on that engineering challenge with more expertise than this team will not be able to be compensated for their work if they make it specifically for this open source printer. According to my understanding of the license.
I’m not an expert in those legal fingerprints, but i can imagine that you might need a parent even if you want to open source it, simply so nobody else can patent it. on the other hand, in right now to lazy/sleepy to read the article, so don’t mind me :)
That’s not how patents work. If you open source something, it will count as prior art if someone else tries to patent the same thing.
ok, as i said I’m unfamiliar with this topic, so I’m happy about some inside.
how do you proof that you open sourced something before somebody patented it? i mean a parent is registered at some authority. is it sufficient to refer to your, e.g., GitHub history?
Slight open-washing involved though - the license is CC-By-NC-SA, which sadly makes it incompatible with open hardware projects, and restricted from being available as a pre-assembled kit.
Fuck NC.
Well you are right ! Still i see it as a massive positive win in this particular sector, but sure, lets see what happen and be greedy with licensing! May the next one/release/update be more open.
I thank you a lot
They do have a survey that includes the kit question.
Here is the link if you are interested: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc0MLIj1Mfv81vaiOIQG1yMEilruRfNgx7h36l5a0qC-G9TZw/viewform
From this update : https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/openprinter/updates/on-the-road-to-launch
creative commons doesn’t even recommend their licenses be used for software (it’s in their faq). i’m guessing the same would apply to hardware designs as well.
Creative Commons does not have any guidelines about using their licenses for hardware. It would still be a better idea to use CERN-OHL for hardware though.
Thanks ;) I learned something!
I’m waiting for a machine to appear with an operating system with an source code, it would be funny
Certainly a cool idea, and I hope it succeeds and turns out to be what it seems.
No price listed on their crowd fund page, so who can say what this might cost? Uses a Raspberry Pi Zero W for the brains and a STM32 for the cartridge board.
While I understand why are they unwilling to allow commercial usage of the final product, it also makes it difficult to actually put in the hands of people. I agree, hopefully they can reconsider for a later iteration.
If it’s not really FOSS, It’s just an attention grabbing, open washing failure in progress, sponsored by people who don’t understand the licensing implications.
i do enjoy the fact they’re repurposing hp cartridges. but if this printer thing actually grabs some traction, i can totally see hp EOLing every printer that uses them and ending new production of those cartridges.
Maybe by then openprinter would have migrated to their ink standard and started producing it. Old models’ ink cartridges can still be refilled but not changed.
I do understand your passion and i respect your disappointment.
While i understand the explicit implications of cc-by-nc-sa, (attribution, non-commercial,share alike) i fail to understand the implicits implications. Could i trouble you to explain it ?
I think the criticism is that it’s less likely to build an ecosystem like a Gnu Public License would (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap for an example of a 3d printer that very successfully used the GPL). The CC license prevents large corporations from stealing the design. But it also prevents someone from 3D-printing parts and selling them on a small ebay store.
Seeing the dissembled printer makes me want it regardless of license tbh
Finally a real answer haha, had to scroll awhile.
So the licensing thing is just mostly people complaining that it isnt the most truiest of openness since people tend to conflate floss with accessibility when people call it open and they mean accessibility.
Still getting a reliable printer that I can fix that I’m not vendor locked by that does all the things I could want a printer to do, since this was their goal I’m glad its happening.
The limits imposed by the license will harm adoption, I hope I’m wrong but there will be no community around this. It will most likely be DOA. Which is a shame… The AGPL would better protect his interests.
Idk how their choice of license limits me front buying their printer and doing the things I want to do with it.
License is extremely sus
Aren’t printers pretty restricted due to needing to have surveillance and anti-counterfeit features? Is this legal at scale?
I don’t actually know but I imagine it’s all voluntary. It seems like kind of an endless tail chase to constantly limit anything that could feasible be used to commit a crime. Actual counterfeiting with any success requires some pretty specialized shit. Honestly if this printer could be configured to meet those specifics them more power to them. End of the day though I wouldn’t imagine this being the gateway to massive expansions in the counterfeit market.
I should clarify, it’s more of a justification for tracking features and market protectionism (like allowing only 4 brands of printer) than an actual issue.
Yeah I was thinking about that. Like, these companies probably have some number of government contracts and those contracts give latitude to make some interesting demands.
Still doesn’t atop them from regulating 3d printers like crazy
Those regulations are silly. It doesn’t stop you from using your 3D printer to print a 3D printer that has no restrictions
I think the feds just asked printer manufacturers nicely
The counterfeit features from my understanding are just matching one simple dot pattern. That could be included in the firmware here as well.
In their discord server the open printer staff said they explicitly aren’t including thst kind of stuff.
OK, that’s kind of a big deal
