Why are there no open source 2d printers?

I worked for a while in the R&D department of HP printer division. As @jacquesm said, good 2D printer costs peanuts. The amount of R&D in color quality, speed and other parameters is huge. There were a lot of teams involved: mechanical, electrical, software, chemical... And because of that investment, there are thousands of patents that the big players are continuously paying each other for. It's a very old market with a lot of legacy. For most of us, a printer is something for home photos, some documents, and so, but that's only a little part of the cake: the money is in professional printing, ads, designers, etc.

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.

Printers are cheap and widely available, which leaves a DIY printer which is going to be slower, more error-prone and more expensive as a very niche idea. There is a clear benefit to buying or building an open hobby 3D printer, whereas that's harder to argue for a 2D one - while there is a lot of crap around, there's enough workable choices, aftermarket inks/toner works, you likely won't be modifying/tuning a 2D printer the same way you maybe would with a 3D printer, ...

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.

See also: https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14501894)

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.

I work with inkjet printers in research for my Masters program. I found the three blog posts about printing on this blog to be helpful: https://www.kylescholz.com/

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.

You answered your question with "apart from the nozzle"

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.

Friendly reminder that rms launched the FLOSS movement because he was incensed when he couldn't program a printer at MIT to do something he wanted.

I'm actively working on one of these right now.

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.

A 3D printer needs only a comparatively simple metal novel, and the rest of the printer is just moving that around, some other things like heating the pad to help things work smoothly, and processing a file into a set of movement instructions for the head.

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.

First, accurate and reliable mechanical manipulation of paper is tricky, to get all kinds of different paper stock to feed reliably without jams and position in the same place.

Second, decent reproduction of e.g. text at decent DPI requires more accuracy in head positioning than what you need for basic 3d printing.

So to me it seems that the big issue is not that a random cheap standard printer would be cheaper, but rather than the home-built version is likely to get worse results than what you can get in store for peanuts.

A FDM 3D printer is mechanically relatively simple; it's more akin to a 3D plotter: it's a vector thing. Household 2D printers do bitmaps.

There's 3D bitmap printers as well, like the SLA resin printers and laser sintering.

The bitmap thing at a high resolution requires higher precision equipment than a typical 3D printer which makes it more difficult to do as a hobbyist. Not impossible, but a factor.

I'm unsure about the statement. I've repaired many printers mechanically. The hardware is generally repairable and the mechanical parts aren't proprietary.

The software on the printers is whatever you buy. Some of them run on available print languages that you can code up your own driver for should you really want to.

And for the example cited, cartridges, Epson had offered a more expensive printer with a do whatever you want ink setup. And Brother lasers have so far accepted any carts I use without complaint.

As for hard to manufacture the entire printer is a molded plastic to reduce cost (massively) and a fabrication plant made printhead. Mass manufacture only for the huge price-break.

2-d printing is mature, I think everyone has high standards.

When it comes to 3-d printing I see two attitudes around me:

(1) People who are involved with "making" from a blue collar standpoint think that "3-d printing is cool but the quality of the product is subpar" (2) People around the engineering department at my local Uni who 3-d print everything they can

A lot of the 3-d printing market targets type (1) and enthusiasts. If those enthusiasts were inkjet enthusiasts they wouldn't mind getting prints spoiled with an ink explosion 5% of the time.

I think the reason is open source communities are more attracted towards tinkering and experimental technologies, and 3D print is much more interesting than 2D printing. 3D printing always has that idea of a manufacturing revolution behind it, 2D printing was a revolution centuries ago and it's a boring technology now.

Mostly the nozzle. The nozzle for an FDM 3D printer could be easily built with desktop tooling from a hardware store. The nozzle for even a cheap inkjet is not within the reach of hobbyists.

Open source 2D plotters do exist.

reading through the comments here the answer seems to be: good printers are cheap and nozzles are hard.

But how about the openwrt-approach? Keep the printer with the good nozzle and starting with the software such a cheap printer runs, trying to get that foss first - jailbreaking your printer if you will. Or swapping the board for a raspberry pi or similar? That would at least help against closed drivers, cartridge restrictions, page counters etc.

There's at least this: https://hackaday.io/project/167446-diy-inkjet-printer

But as others have mentioned, commercial printers are really cheap, especially for how complicated they are to replicate so there's not much motivation to make them.

Related: I have a HP 4000 with duplex, which is an absolute unit (beast) of a small workgroup laser printer. It's 20+yrs old, still going strong and parts are easy to get.

BUT, it's compute bound with modern print jobs, and is missing modern protocols like Bonjour.

What if someone open sourced a legacy printer? I'd love to re-brain this printer.

I wish that the intelligence in printers would migrate back to the computer. Having printers with their own complex formats (PCL, PostScript, etc.) only makes them inscrutable and lends itself to proprietary competing formats and printouts which never gets quite right. I think the original NeXT machine was on the right track with their simple bitmap-only laser printer, where the PostScript processing was done on the computer side.

I would say,it is difficulty to access of technology. Inkjet Printers are either pizo or heat nozel based, both tech works at microlevel and are built with semiconductor based fabrication methods, which is mostly outof reach of enthusiasts.

"In the 3D printing world, there are plenty of open source choices, ..."

The 3D printers you are talking about are very simple. Those are Fused Deposition Modeling and StereoLithography printers.

But there are also 3D printers that work like 2D printers. For example Selective Laser Sintering and PolyJet printers. Just like 2D printers they are very hard to make. Those type of printers are also not available as open source choice.

https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...

cough I'll just leave this here. Want some coffee, two sugars, right?

Point being, there are quite a few alternative use cases that commodity printers have going on under the covers that no one tends to talk about all that much. There's forensic watermarking for one but also supposedly certain features hard-coded in where if it detects it in an input, it intentionally leaves it out as an anti-counterfeiting measure. The article for that one was floating around on HN a while ago. I'll see if I can dredge it up.

Making copies is one of those things where there are several opportunities for power consolidation to be had if you look hard enough.

It's like the whole issue with 3d printing of guns. No one in an authoritative position necessarily wants everyone to have the capability to generate at will perfect duplication of information due to the consequences that spells for several entrenched, high relative value use cases.

Because a good 2D printer costs peanuts.

In the 80s there was DIY 2D plotter Alfi [1] for ZX Spectrum. I had and used one. This year, i visited my friends trying to run current DIY 3D printer, and funny thing is that it was plagued by similar isses like the 2D plotter several decades before.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq2fGkQO_gQ

It's not so much that it's hard, but rather so far just hasn't been worth it. The average small business owner / consumer spends what, $100-200 for a printer and maybe $100/year on consumables if they print a moderate amount? The pain point just isn't there compared to the 3D printing world in the pre-RepRap days of a little over a decade ago when a printer cost thousands of dollars and $100 in consumables in a week or less.

For something as inexpensive as 2D printers to really get some interest in the 'open' world, they'd probably need to start being as obnoxious as the mobile phone market. Think changing printer languages (i.e. PostScript and PCL) in backwards incompatible ways every year or two and requiring changes to 'new and improved' incompatible consumables (i.e. ink and paper) every so often while cutting off supply to existing customers of the old consumables well before the useful life of the printer has been reached.

Here is a business idea: the printer that just works.

Requirements:

- laser printer that works with non-proprietary toners

- USB plug & play on all major operating systems

- Network printing via WiFi and ethernet

- No 2GB bloatware installation required, i dont want your shitty photo management software, just give me the driver

- Replaceable parts

I have a multifunction A3 printer / scanner from a major manufacturer with an auto feeder and 3 other trays/inputs. It has USB input, network cable, wifi, internal tanks, fax capability, a colour touch screen....

The hardware works very well. The software is weird and inconsistent. It can do some very useful things if you access the scanning function in one, incredibly convoluted way, but not in other ways. It can scan to a network share, but you have to put the password in every time. It's frustrating because it's so good and so bad at the same time.

I would love to have an open source firmware in it.

On October 23, 2012, I paid $133.76 for a "Brother HL-2270DW Compact Laser Printer with Wireless Networking and Duplex" and I have only ever used $12-15 third-party toner cartridges with it.

I had to buy a replacement drum unit in 2016, that was $22.59 (third party, of course).

I find it unlikely that an open-source DIY printer is going to result in something better or cheaper than what I've got.

I have Samsung CLP-310 Color Laser Printer from 2008. It was the last one ever, which you can force-reset so it does count how many times a color cassette been used. I can refill those cassettes from half liter buckets from ebay for €10. It is just incredibly reliable.

One and only problem is that only the XP-windows Samsung printer drivers work truly well. But I have 2008 laptop for that.

I don’t think the nozzle would have to be open source for this to be useful, just a printer that can be modified to print on things other than paper and be cool about whatever cartridges you put it it would be great. Inkjet cartridges are a little messy, but easy to refill at home, whit the printers DRM like check’s being the main issue. This project reverse engineered cartridge control and developed an ESP32 controlled hand held printer: http://spritesmods.com/?art=magicbrush&page=3

In addition to what's been mentioned, printing has much tighter tolerance requirements, e.g., to distinguish between "h" and "b" at a small font size. It actually has to be a very good spatial representation of the design. And how cheap printers actually accomplish this with crude bits of plastic and stamped metal is pretty amazing.

On the other hand, 3d printed objects may only need to satisfy overall mechanical needs, or be suggestive of the shape that they model, to serve a purpose. Most 3d printing that I've seen needs a bit of hand tooling at the end, to really be useful.

It's the nozzle. Let's suppose you really wanted to design your own nozzle... you could use something like MUMPS, which is $5,800 for 15 dice, plus 100 for each additional. You have to wrestle together 15 people to pay 400 bucks (or 20 to pay 300, and so forth) for a printhead that probably won't work. Figure it'll take several iterations and everyone needs to be in for thousands and thousands of dollars.

It's doable but only among a group of very wealthy hobbyists.

People with this kinda money typically gravitate towards high vacuum projects and microwave electronics

A different take on this question: Is there a whitebox/ODM/shanzai print engine that could be combined with an open controller board or RPi? What companies actually make the hard parts of printers?

Not a printer, but there is an open-source printing press: https://openpressproject.com/

Patents are not an issue on having opensource 2D printers but the average hackers don't have the manufacturing capability to make an inkjet print head. There are lots of design on the internet on how to build your own inkjet printer. I think it's not exciting enough to explore in a garage since we can pickup a decent printer from the garbage. I am more excited on parts I can salvage from an office printer than thinking of building a better one.

Because RepRap [1]. Proprietary 3D printers already were on the market.

Because you can print 3D printer with 3D printer. You can make paper templates with paper template.

[1] How he started the worldwide 3D printing revolution / Adrian Bowyer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV0Tjwq7Uc0

3d printing is exciting new tech. Paper print is way over it's most exciting times. This would make great advances in developing a open source 2d printer not be that much exciting.

And that's probably also why there's so much focus on pen plotters they look special like vynil discs. And that triggers interest.

This is an interesting project, a 3D printed 2D CAD drawing machine. Basically a 3D printed plotter!

GRBL Plotter Elegoo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYqx5wg4oLU

Printer manufacturers don't make money on printers. They make money on ink. Making money on ink requires a closed system to require the ink purchase. There is aftermarket ink, but companies are always working to defeat it.

Maybe if you move the printer head over the paper (like in 3D) rather than drag paper though the device you could make something simple (b/w) with impressive life span. I have no idea if such printers exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHX6tHdQGiQ

i think the 2D equivalent to a 3D printer is not a regular printer, but a plotter. and there's a fairly robust community around hacking pen plotters. for eg, https://github.com/beardicus/awesome-plotters

I would check out Axidraw instead, much better!

https://axidraw.com

I don't know about 2d printers, but there are lots of open source/DIY 2d plotters.

Or washing machines, dishwashers, cars or even planes?

I'm afraid the answer is due to the fact that we live under a corporatocracy, and that this is the way things roll round here!

Good luck with anyone who is trying to get a open source version of whatever out there. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, I suspect it won't work out, but I have my fingers crossed for you!

In a world where screens are everywhere who needs printers ?

I doubt I've printed out more than 100 documents in the last 20 years.

There are still a few legacy areas where nothing else will do like legal procedures and shipping labels but for the most part printers just don't seem like a broadly useful enough technology to interest most open source enthusiasts.

There are many open source pen plotters. Welcome back to the 80s!

open source pen plotter: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2504587

Because they cost nothing to buy.

what's a 2d printer

You have to analyze the reality of this world. First off open source cannot exist without closed source.

Imagine if everything in the world went open source. Then nobody would be getting paid, everyone would starve because they're giving away there work for free.

Most things in this world are profit oriented products produced as a direct result a capitalism. Open source is an offshoot phenomenon in software arising because software is both easier than other forms of engineering (see thousands of bootcamps) and also easily copyable.

However it should be known that most software developers need to have a job in closed source software in order to pay the bills.

Whenever you see something open source you have to know it's an offshoot phenomenon. These are side projects spawned by intense interest but ultimately still a side project to a person's main line of work which is ultimately profitable. Be surprised that there are 3D printers because it's abnormal. The fact that there are no open source 2D printers arises because there's lack of interest and because there's no profit in open source 2D printers.