
WiFi-enable USB printers with a Raspberry Pi and share it over your network - willswire
https://www.balena.io/blog/wifi-enable-usb-printers-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-share-it-over-your-network/
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ay
The article maybe should explain why not just apt-get install cups and wifi-
share the USB printer (AirPrint included) without the need for downloads from
github or an account somewhere which presumably can get a copy of your every
page.

I did exactly that at home, and also installed a second printer driver which
prints into a PDF file, piled into a HTTP-served directory, so I can easily
“print” stuff from my iPhone to reference later or to send to a friend,
without any paper.

Very happy with the results.

Raspberry Pi Zero W (10 euro IIRC).

Drawback: it’s not very fast.

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harha
One advantage of Balena seems to be that the logs in the cloud reduce wear on
the sd card, so you can just unplug the raspberry pi (I can’t find the source
right now - I think it was in the issues of balena sound’s GitHub Page)

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garaetjjte
Why you would need persistent logs for printer?

I use Alpine with CUPS and splix installed in "diskless" mode.

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econcon
I've Samsung SCX 3201G bought 6 years ago and still running on the starter
toner cartridge, I've printed 739 pages so far with it as per the statistic.

Printer was $180 and new cartridge on HPs website is listed for $85 for
standard cartridge with 1500 prints.

There are $10 Chinese cartridge available for same printer

What do you guys recommend? I am already using it with Pi+Cups.

Well the printing issues started appearing when I noticed my pages in printer
had a lot of dust, I've no idea of its dust which killed my print quality or
70% used cartridge.

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loa_in_
There's already a good solution to this: usbip is supported in all major Linux
kernels and has drivers for Windows as well.

The source code of usbip was merged into the staging tree, and finally has
been moved to the mainline since Linux-3.17. For Windows, the precompiled
client-side program is available from the project page. You need a Linux
machine (could be raspberry pi) for the server side.

Link: [http://usbip.sourceforge.net/](http://usbip.sourceforge.net/)

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fulafel
How is tje security situation? This post from few years paints a sad picture:
[https://sourceforge.net/p/usbip/mailman/message/35003716/](https://sourceforge.net/p/usbip/mailman/message/35003716/)

~~~
loa_in_
I would tunnel the connection through SSH, which if is good for X sessions
(and their keystrokes) I believe is good enough for this

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gen3
Interesting project. I did something similar with a raspberry Pi I had laying
around and a receipt printer. I installed the serial print driver, then just
apt installed the avahi and cups daemons. It was then accessible to everything
else on my network. I later made a nice little web UI that allowed you to
write (or upload) whatever and get it printed. (Along with a messaging bot
that allowed you to send it anything cups will ingest like .png or .pdfs or
raw text. It was a fun little project that also let me print files to my real
printer when I wasn’t even home!).

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mastrsushi
How long does this OS take to boot? This seems like a way too simple task for
a Linux equipped Raspberry Pi.

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bjoli
People are really bad at gouging exactly how powerful an rpi is. I have met
people that bought several to do a lot of things that would barely put any
stress on a raspberry pi 3.

I have a rpi4 4gb that acts as a torrent box, a unifi controller, IRC machine,
print server and a music player.

I just put an aluminium pipe filled with copper coins on the CPU. The thermal
mass and extra heat dissipation area makes sure it rarely goes over 50c. Most
of the time (98%?) the workload is just barely discernable from idle.

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xupybd
Cool idea I'd do it for the fun of it but my last wifi printer was $80NZD a Pi
would cost me over $50NZD. I'm not sure this makes any economic sense. Not
that fun projects need to.

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harha
It might be nice to have a printer that doesn’t call home or an order one that
is easier to refill.

Also with the cheaper pi zero, why waste a functioning printer - you might
also have other services running on the Raspberry pi.

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jjeaff
Ya, I have used a setup like this for an older thermal label printer. You can
buy a good used zebra label printer for $75 on eBay where a more modern wifi
enabled version would cost several hundred dollars.

