How to build a printer

I've been seeing the Xteink a lot lately. Should I get an X3 or an X4? I don't really know why I want it, but I have an eInk addiction, so I just need it.

[OP] cat-whisperer | 10 hours ago

It's funny that X3 is a successor of X4. Only downside is that X4 has a USB-C port and X3 doesn't

stavros | 9 hours ago

What about the back light? Are they otherwise identical?

: [OP] cat-whisperer | 9 hours ago
X3 isn't backlit, but the battery lasts 7 days. So, it's pretty good for me

a2dam | 10 hours ago

I've owned all of them and the answer is the X4 Pro IMO. It has a backlight, which is the only thing I really missed on the others.

hamaluik | 8 hours ago

I bought an x4 a month or so ago, zero regrets. It sounds hyperbolic but it’s finally been the thing to actually decouple me from my phone. Whenever I’m out and about, bored, I just slide it out and pick up where I left off reading last. It’s a nicer reading experience on my kobo but the portability and.. frankly charm just can’t be beat.

sho_hn | 9 hours ago

This is a fantastic idea!

joshmarinacci | 9 hours ago

I love the concept, but I wonder why he wasn’t printing to PDF. Can this device not render PDFs?

[OP] cat-whisperer | 9 hours ago

I was thinking of this, but rendering PDF takes a lot out of a 400KB RAM'd device. It also needs a ton of things to actually work which the ROM can't hold.

Kindles have a ton of RAM, this one didn't.

bluGill | 9 hours ago

Probably not. It doesn't appear to have enough ram. I'm not sure the CPU is up to that either.

ValdikSS | 8 hours ago

PDF is very, very complicated standard which can't be handled properly on tiny MCUs with reasonable performance and spec conformance:

    - 4 font formats
    - 9 image formats
    - blending with transparency
    - different colorspaces, each image could use its own on the page
    - different dithering algorithms, each image with its own
    - the page can have elements from another pages (global elements)

This is only a small part from the top of my head.

Common simple home printers absolutely should not accept regular PDF as an input: thanks to Apple and IETF we now have Apple Raster and PWG Raster for printers, as a part of AirPrint and IPP Everywhere/Mopria driverless printing standards, which are very similar but have slightly different options and headers. It's a simple raster input for printers specifically.

Some companies, such as HP, invented a "raster PDF": PCLm / PCLms. Don't be confused by the name, it's a regular standard-conforming PDF which contain nothing but a full-page JPEG on each page, and don't use any other features. It's created only to be able to open "printed page" (driver output) in a standard PDF viewer on a PC for debugging or business logging needs, but otherwise it's like a regular JPEG with additional per-page metadata.

ghostly_s | 8 hours ago

This thing is an e-reader with 16GB of flash and an SD slot. It has native support for PDF.

[OP] cat-whisperer | 7 hours ago

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0759/9344/8689/files/X3-EN...

check page 3. even I was surprised

: silon42 | 3 hours ago
First I see GIF and PNG missing.

ks2048 | 9 hours ago

Good job, but I’m left wanting to know how to build a printer.

[OP] cat-whisperer | 9 hours ago

I'd say it's an eco-friendly printer

tdeck | 6 hours ago

If a DIY plotter would do, this site has a long list of different projects

https://mattwidmann.net/notes/pen-plotters/

: voxelghost | 3 hours ago
What if I want a cabinet sized rotating head printer that can print carbonpaper triplets, sounds a machinegun, and has LP0 ON FIRE error message

d--b | 5 hours ago

There is an open source one https://www.opentools.studio

zxexz | 2 hours ago

How is that open source? There’s not a single line of code. No CAD. Nothing. Sure, there’s a “coming soon” CrowdSupply link, which I guess is more than a KickStarter. But open source?

: d--b | an hour ago
Ah sorry, I thought they were already open source. They say they will open source it once they finalize the design, but yeah, not there yet.

greazy | 9 hours ago

I don't understand the purpose. What am I missing?

The author "prints" to the eink display. Why not load say the pdf directly?

[OP] cat-whisperer | 9 hours ago

> I was thinking of this, but rendering PDF takes a lot out of a 400KB RAM'd device. It also needs a ton of things to actually work which the ROM can't hold.

> Kindles have a ton of RAM, this one didn't.

ghostly_s | 8 hours ago

It's an e-reader. According to the specs it has native support for PDF.

: mrheosuper | 7 hours ago
It's an esp32 MCU, even if it can somehow run the PDF render pipeline, it won't be more ideal than just accept the raw byte stream and display.

stdatomic | 9 hours ago

From the 4th line in the article:

> But getting stuff onto it was tedious. I had to join its hotspot and open a little upload website in my browser. Yuck.

Anyway, very creative, I like the idea a lot.

sowbug | 5 hours ago

I've wanted something like this for a long time to print recipes that I'm about to cook. I don't want my phone in the kitchen getting gunk on it, so I'll usually print on paper, get the gunk on the paper, and then throw it out.

I'm not going to create a recipe PDF and load it on an e-reader. That's too much work. But I will happily press control-P on a recipe web page and select the eink display as the target.

: [OP] cat-whisperer | 4 hours ago
I am no cook, but you my friend are cooking something here
: greazy | an hour ago
Right! I like this usecase very much. For uses existing software infra to perform the required task.
I wonder now what else we've reinvented when it comes to sending data...

maybewhenthesun | 2 hours ago

I'd like my e-reader to show up as a printer, and when I print something on it it actually gets saved as a pdf on the reader. Like in the article, but multi-page pdf.

I often do 'print to A5 pdf => copy pdf to e-reader'. Would be nice to do that in one step from any program that can print.

NDlurker | 9 hours ago

Very cool. I'll be updating to this fork

: [OP] cat-whisperer | 9 hours ago
Thanks. It's rough around the edges, so PRs are open, and there's a recipe in the repo if you want to build your own apps.

ValdikSS | 8 hours ago

>penguin would shrink the result to fit its screen. >I declared A5 and Letter paper, media type stationery, and an output bin called face-up.

You can (and should!) define exact dimensions of your screen in `media-size-supported`. It will probably be a non-standard IPP name, that's why you should define that in `media-supported` as `om_NNNmmxYYYmm` or `oe_NNNinxYYYin`

That way you don't need to scale the incoming data, the PC will format it exactly to the dimensions of the screen.

Both PWG Raster and Apple Raster support 1-bit-per-pixel mode (instead of 8-bit-per-pixel you use), that's why the input could be 8 times less in size. Use `print-color-mode-{supported,default}=bi-level` instead of `monochrome` for that. And also tune `urf-supported`'s `W` option, use `W1` for this case.

The screen/dithering could be ass in 1-bit mode, see https://github.com/OpenPrinting/libcupsfilters/pull/160 where I added more dithering options (Linux-only though, Apple seems to abandon their CUPS).

[OP] cat-whisperer | 8 hours ago

lovely, this would save me a bunch of memory during transformation and dithering. Will do!

Neywiny | 8 hours ago

This is why I like it here. Somebody does irrefutably incredible work outside of their comfort zone, and somebody else goes "yeah actually I was born in that zone. Moulded by it. Here's how to improve it" (in a positive way)

ValdikSS | 7 hours ago

Oh no, I wasn't, and that's definitely not my comfort zone. I mess with the printers and printing stack due to anger, not because I like it.

It's bugs on bugs, with bugs chasing bugs! So little developers, so complex stack with 25 years of technical debt, and little community around because it's not a sexy technology to be involved in.

That's why I have to dive deep and fix my bugs myself if I want to make it work properly as I would like it to. I also ended up making my own print server device, because China did not make a proper one for some reason for all these years.

edoceo | 5 hours ago

That's even cooler

: quijoteuniv | 3 hours ago
Same feeling when family or friends ask me for help with Micros word about formatting, tables or inserting pictures in the last 25 years….

lopis | 3 hours ago

Anger is the only valid emotion when dealing with printers.

darkvision77 | 2 hours ago

> Use `print-color-mode-{supported,default}=bi-level` instead of `monochrome` for that

The last time I checked (a year ago), 1bpp was suddenly supported only by Windows. IIRC, monochrome is REQUIRED, while bi-level is OPTIONAL in RFC.

Not sure how things stand now, though. Ever since then, I've just been carrying Floyd–Steinberg dithering around.

alternativeworl | 8 hours ago

Very cool. I was expecting to learn about the ins and outs of ink, printheads etc but instead learned "How to build a paper that acts like a printer" which turned out much more entertaining.

: [OP] cat-whisperer | 7 hours ago
glad you liked it!
: a3w | 13 minutes ago
Wanted ideas on how to build an ink printer that is untraceable. For privacy reasons.

e12e | 4 hours ago

Nice. I keep wondering if these devices would play nicer with DjVu rather than pdfs and raster formats?

https://djvu.sourceforge.net/

tapia | 4 hours ago

In Linux it's pretty easy to create such things with cups. A while ago I did a cups backend for my Fujitsu Quaderno A4 [1]. It is super useful to be able to just open any document, in any program that supports printing, and then just "print" it to my device.

[1] https://github.com/cristobaltapia/dpt-rp1-cups

IdiotSavage | 4 hours ago

> any program that supports printing

Unfortunately printing support seems to go out of fashion, at least in macOS land.

Lately I needed a quick printout of a markdown document. I could have used TextEdit for the raw text, but I wanted the styling too. Learned that neither VSCode, Xcode nor Obsidian can print. (There is a community plugin for Obsidian.)

rrr_oh_man | 3 hours ago

LOL. TIL you can’t print from VSCode.

simonjgreen | 3 hours ago

Or Obsidian

maybewhenthesun | 2 hours ago

printing has never really been a thing from text editors I think.

Used to be that printing a text file was just `cat myfile.txt > /dev/lp0` .

It has been a while since I printed a plain text file, but I guess there's still a similar command available with some research.

: voidUpdate | an hour ago
I've done the same from a raspberry pi to a receipt printer, just piping to lp0

jiehong | 3 hours ago

Pretty cool work! And it’s nice to see printer discovery works through the standard mDNS!

Regarding the size of the page being sent to the printer, I remember reading that printers used to be postscript interpreters and the result of that program would be the page.

Perhaps that would trade ram for compute, but might be more complex in the end.

kitd | 2 hours ago

Good article.

One of the great things about having an open platform like the Xteink is that it should uncover loads of novel and unsatisfied use cases. Eg, this could be paired with a mobile phone to act as a secondary display much better suited to outdoor applications in bright sunlight.

yeasin-arafat | an hour ago

Emulating a network printer to send pages to an e-ink screen is such a clever hack. Every OS already has the print dialog built in.

pimterry | an hour ago

This would be a neat API for a digital photo frame - just print photos to it and they appear on the screen.

: [OP] cat-whisperer | an hour ago
yes!!

Wilson2000 | 40 minutes ago

Love this!