Serious question: Is there an open-source 2D printer (the type with paper and ink)?

If not, why not? Is there some serious production bottleneck that only HP&co can meet?

@buherator I'm told that Brother is more friendly than HP and Canon regarding ink supplies.

@buherator My guess on this is that many tech savvy people try to get rid of printers for everyday tasks, leaving only a small community of print enthusiasts, and that is further fractured into the wide range of possible shapes (@th is doing plotter scale stuff with what may even be open hardware; @haraldgeyer is more on the producing-a-book end of things, and there's a huge space in between even without getting started on colour).

@buherator "open source" is either 10 requirements; https://opensource.org/osd or a development model, so it's not applicable to hardware.

People have made free hardware designs (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-hardware-designs.en.html) for pen plotters and written free control software, which is somewhat usable for black and white printing as long as you are okay with low accuracy and smudging and often having to change pens.

Paper feeding and inking mechanisms are not trivial to implement and still heavily restricted by patents despite every variant being worked out 50 years ago (conversely 3D printing mechanisms are much easier, as people only really expect one workpiece, or a few on a bed of a fixed size to be printed out).

Kyocera printers run GNU/Linux, including GPLv2, LGPLv2.1 and GPLv3 software (they made some effort to exclude GPLv3 software, even though GPLv2 still requires installation information, but there are GPLv3 files in the software they use that was compiled in) and if they didn't intentionally infringe copyright by refusing to provide corresponding source code and installation information, getting free software to run on those printers would be hard but possible.

@chrysn @buherator @th
I have been looking into this some 15 years ago, as commercial printer firmwares don't support my requirements.

One thing about laser printers: Even HP wasn't producing the actual printing parts themselves. They import from Japanese companies, that kind of invented it. You could probably buy the same parts and make the rest open-source fairly easily.

Or you pick a popular model (available 2nd hand in quantity) and design an electronics replacement kit for that model.

@haraldgeyer @chrysn @th sounds fair, I guess extensive docs and good sw for a commercial model can be just as useful as some fully open design for most. What is still bothering me is the ink: is it possible to produce that from off-the-shelf components for yourself independently from a vendor?

@buherator @chrysn @th Before each ink cartridge had a chip with an usage counter, it was quite common to refill used cartridges with cheap ink from independent suppliers. (A rather messy task and not sure, how much money we saved by that.)

However that was ready made ink from cheap(er) sources. I don't know anything about making ink yourself. I guess, you at least would need to be careful about health safety during production: Pigments are very fine dust, that you probably shouldn't inhale.

@buherator @chrysn @th Of course, one of the benefits of a custom firmware would be, that you can disable such refill checks...

@haraldgeyer @chrysn @th thanks for the warning, I was asking exactly bc I'm always comfortable with hacking on firmware, but not with chemistry...

@buherator I don't know about printers, but how about a plotter?

https://andrewsleigh.github.io/plotter/

@puck I guess printing bitmap data (a bitmap diagram embedded in a PDF) is problematic, right?

@buherator Oh my goodness, people have worked on this. Here's just one example. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36674210/converting-bmp-image-to-set-of-instructions-for-a-plotter

I might have to dig my old HP plotter out of my basement.