DIY open source inkjet printers offer a sustainable and customizable printing solution. They eliminate the need for unnecessary plastic and reduce carbon emissions from shipping. With these printers, you only replace what's broken, avoiding the cycle of buying new ones due to planned obsolescence. They're versatile, suitable for everything from art projects to printing on unconventional materials like toilet paper. Plus, they offer more security for printing sensitive information, sidestepping the data recovery issues common with commercial printers.
- A prototype created by Nicholas C Lewis
- This shield allows you to connect a HP C6602 inkjet cartridge to your Arduino turning it into a 96dpi print platform
Advantages[edit | edit source]
There are a lot of interesting possibilities for the use of such DIY open source inkjet printers to create appropriate technologies for sustainable development.
- avoiding unnecessary plastic parts in most commercial printers
- avoiding shipping carbon-fingerprint cost
- fully customization and artistic projects
- when your printer will break down, you won't buy a new one like nowadays with commercial printers, you'll just replace or fix the part that is malfunctionining in your open source.
- no more planned-obsolence chips or drivers added by the manufacturer to force keep replacing their expensive ink cartridge.
Potential Applications[edit | edit source]
- Replacing commercial inkjet printers
- Egg-bot or circular printers like this pingpong printer
- Ticket or Barcode printer, Little Printer example, Toilet paper printer idea
- More secure printer, e.g. for printing QR-Codes of cryptographic keys (many commercial printers on the market allow recovering recently printed documents from memory)
TO DO[edit | edit source]
- Adding more print cartridge (only HP C6602 inkjet supported at the moment)
- Creating an open source print cartridge. forum discussion