In the 3D printing world, there are plenty of open source choices, allowing manufacturers to drive down costs. On the other hand, it seems 2d printing is stuck with legacy companies with completely closed drivers and hardware (you have to buy cartridges from the original manufacturer).
Apart from the nozzle why is it hard to manufacture and/or design?
Once that is said, it should be possible to work in a general-purpose open source 2d printer. The open community has achieved bigger goals. The biggest problem I can see is the entry barrier: to get a very basic printer, you have to invest thousands of time with a lot of knowledge in different areas, when a basic printer, even from the large companies, is not very expensive.
I think that one of the only chances we have for that to happen is that a company frees its designs and patents and community starts working from there.
Shouldn't anything relevant have expired years ago? The first laserjet came out in 1984 it seems. Prices have come down, but I haven't seen any real innovation in printers (not that I really need any- I just want them to print)- since 2000.
The business printers in 2000 had slow processors and more ram. It was significantly bad that printing PDFs spent more time processing the file than putting toner on page.
Finally, the interfacing for printers today is fantastic. I know this isn’t about toner on page, but having wifi connection, an LCD touchscreen interface, and them generally being a little smaller has made the experience better.
The only thing that was better about printing in 2000 is that back then printing was more useful because so many people wanted paper copies.
It'd probably be easier to make a nice block alphabet for a plotter and then just print your documents as biro drawings.
But again, feeding paper seems like a very fiddly problem.
Daisy wheel printers were slow, loud, and had huge limits (no kerning, single typeface, no printing family photos), but the print quality was good. And if you are the kind of person who likes mechanical keyboard sounds, the sound of a daisy wheel printer is pretty cool.
https://youtu.be/ZVQkbT-g3aw
Printer paper came in long, laser-perforated sheets with tabs. You'd load in the start and one sheet pulls in the next.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_stationery
The crank you had to put into the front of the printer to get the steam-powered engine turning could jam in the transmission, though, and you had to watch the temperature of your coal-fired ink tank so it didn't over-boil. Those "electronic" printer guys thought they were so fancy.
"A reverse-engineered typewriter hack to make it into a printer. Using a simple MOSFET circuit and an Arduino (actually, a Light Blue Bean+ arduino compatible board), I reverse-engineered my IBM Wheelwriter 6 typewriter to print out text and some rudimentary graphics. The GitHub repository is here, and I'll continue to update it with schematics, etc., when I get some time: https://github.com/tofergregg/IBM-Wheelwriter-Hack"
Same user has a similar hack for a 1960s Smith Corona Sterling Automatic 12: https://github.com/tofergregg/smith_corona_printer
OTOH hacking an IBM Executive might have been something. Proportional spacing!! (but a much fiddlier mechanism)
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And ink cartridges
The ink cartridges are good money, but it’s not where the money is at.
[0] https://www.rfdtv.com/story/42630937/global-ink-cartridges-m...
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There isn't much return or expertise on building an open source 2D printer, as opposed to 3D printers.
Ink delivery is likely the main challenge (although I've seen some low-res attempts), combined with the speed and precision needed for a good printer - reaching a few hundred DPI requires positioning things quite precisely. Laser printers are interesting, but then you need specialized parts like the drum that I'd expect to be difficult to produce in single quantities.
Open pen plotters are a thing, but again not typically used for normal printing duties.
There's a massive growth curve too. If we could find a way to print on plastic, we could integrate this with a 3d printer and make decorated parts. I think this would be multiple stages of amateur R&D, but it would eventually happen (yes, I suspect someone will respond with all the technical issues why it can't work with current technology, ignoring all disclaimers -- I am aware this won't work right now).
I think of tons of other use cases.
I think the problem is as others have described. Making a printhead costs peanuts, but engineering one and NREs are astronomical. Ditto for paper handling, and many other parts of the printer. There used to be an printhead open enough for DIY (you could buy them in quantities of 1, and there was a spec sheet), but it's not sold anymore.
Those kinds of printers already exist commercially. The argument is the same: Printing on clothes or PCBs might be cool, but crappy DIY printers that can do that are even more niche than crappy DIY printers that print on paper.
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Something pen-plotters don't do (they typically want paper to be placed down for them, or work of a roll of paper), and the maybe 3D-printer equivalent of preparing the print bed and removing prints from it is a well-known source of problems and manual work.
You'd never run out of toner at least.
Edit, answered at least one question: yes engravers do 500 dpi routinely. Here's one: https://www.troteclaser.com/en-us/knowledge/tips-for-laser-u...
Also, high power lasers are consumables.
Then how about a printer that can print on a large wall? E.g. with spray paint.
Some of the documents that we previously received through FOIA suggested that all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable.
The author describes their work to make a very simple DIY inkjet printer for under $1000. While they are using a nozzle that they purchased, you can make a similar one yourself (check out the book "Microdrop generation" by Eric Lee).
All-in-all it's fairly complicated just to start printing droplets, to say nothing of scaling beyond a single nozzle or precisely moving the printhead.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DckWNwE7R4
It is the nozzle. Everything else is very simple to make because it is already done for 3d printers that are more complex than 2d printers(if you do not consider the nozzle).
5 years or so ago I made a 2d plotter with friends at my 3d printers community with the reverse engineering knowledge that we had about a specific cartridge with nozzles on it.
Printing with ink was easy, very easy. But we were interested in using it for 3d print wax, not so easy.
You need to manufacture nozzles, and that requires lots of money. That requires manufacturing plants. Very cheap in volume, but requires volume.
Open source has not volume in the millions, like big companies have, and those companies are not going to sell you the nozzles so you commoditize their professional field like linux did.
What you are talking about I refer to as 2.5 axis machine vs the traditional 3 axis PLA/FDM printer. Aka a plotter. Using an inkjet cartridge or a laserjet toner on a piece of paper outside the context of the printer it was designed for seems foolhardy at best... but what about moving a pen up and down?
Shameless plug, I've been working on a project called Robot Draws You! (www.robotdrawsyou.com). I'm currently using an off-the-shelf machine and the software / cloud hoops it requires me to jump through were enough to convince me to build my own machine. For the proof of concept I'm using a Duet2 board, but eventually I want to write some code that will sit on a raspi and talk to the Duet to allow the machine a more granular drip-feed style control over the "printing" process". More on that later.
"Why is it hard?" The challenge starts with taking in a given SVG file, making sure it scales / fits within the bounds of a given writeable area, and then generating GCODE to send to the printer / plotter. Because there's no extruder, custom GCODE needs to get created to take advantage of the GPIO pins to move a servo up/down to control the pen. The software challenge is replacing the much-hated cloud interface I complain about. It may suck, but it does a lot and it actually works.
The more I use "the cloud", the more I am reminded it does not provide adequate controls/info on:
- The size of the rendered image relative to the writeable area
- The order in which the layers of the file get rendered
- Information about the progress / time left per layer
- Repeatability of failed layers without re-writing entire project
So crazy me decided "I'll make my own plotter UI and hardware!" It's slow going but it's really fun and I enjoy the challenge. The end solution is going to be a mix of hardware and software that allows you to upload an SVG / vector file to a web UI, start/stop/repeat layers and control the order of the rendering. I like to make drawings of people, and also want to use this to make gigantic maps as well.
There are tons of OS boards and software already developed around this problem, you don't have to do it all yourself.
A 2D printer needs to deal with four or more liquids (ink) or fine pieces of plastic (toner). Rather than just heating the ink up, a tiny electrical current is used to squeeze out a drop at a time. Everywhere the liquid touches can get dried up, and needs to be self-cleaned. And then you have to address the color mixing algorithm, calibration, ICC profiles, etc. There are waste ink absorbers, print heads, etc. many of which involve specialty materials that can only be made in a precision factory, which would not be available for open source development.