this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
90 points (100.0% liked)

Free and Open Source Software

17924 readers
30 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Gaywallet@beehaw.org
alyaza@beehaw.org
90
FOSS-Firmware for printers? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago by RandomLegend@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/foss@beehaw.org
30 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

We all are pretty annoyed at how the printer industry is screwing customers over. There are a few printers that are really good but most of them suck and try to suck out your money by demanding ink when none is needed.

And i also know that it's nearly impossible to create an open-source printer that can be build by smaller businesses like the 3D printing space can do.

But are there any projects underway to reverse-engineer printer firmware and make it possible to flash the custom ROM onto a printer? No specific manufacturer in mind right now, but wouldn't that make things better? Simply disable all the stupid checks that claim that you NEED ink to scan or that you NEED yellow to print a black text?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] dark_stang@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you only need to print a few pages a month or year, send them to a corner store or Walgreens or something. It's just not worth it. I'm assuming the average person needs to print 10 pages or less a year, and this is why there isn't a big push to fix this problem. I think the last time I needed to print something was in 2021.

[–] RandomLegend@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well in many parts of europe such copy shops arent really that usual.

I'd have to drive 20 min to get to the next one.

[–] dark_stang@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

That's a bummer. Just about every pharmacy and shipping store in the US also has a print shop inside of it. And our libraries do cheap printing too. So even if you're in the boonies you're usually only a few minutes away from something.