How to build a f**king printer
45 points by nishantjosh
45 points by nishantjosh
In the early days of home computing those computers had the same problem. Printing to a spool file was common practice then too. E.g.
A QuickDraw printer driver captures in a temporary disk file (called a spool file)--or in memory--the images of an entire page, translates the pixels into dot-placement instructions, and sends these instructions to the printer.
I used exactly the same trick to build a Home Assistant display on an eInk device. These little ESP32s don't have enough RAM to mirror every pixel on screen at once, even in black and white, but you can stream data in line by line over the network. So I render the screen on a Raspberry Pi and stream it over. Of course a higher-end ESP32 which costs $0.50 more would solve the problem, but where's the fun in that...
Incredible.
thanks buddy
I'm this close to buying one of these things, partly because of this post. Getting things onto my Tolino is just annoying enough that I only ever use it for ebooks. I'd love to read longform articles on it, even do code review, but it's never realistically going to happen. I tried to like the Daylight Computer DC-1 (which I could read articles directly on, as it's a full Android tablet) but the form factor was too big for daily use for me.
This is such a cool idea!
Now i'm tempted to write a IPP print server for my Remarkable tablet.
It would really be a convenient file transfer option.
Inspiring work!