this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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We would absolutely love an actual open source printer you can get off the shelf parts and maybe some 3d printing and just use normal liquid ink rather than some inkjet cartridges. And no not some janky 3D printer set up to be a make shift printer, like an actual put the paper in and stuff comes out kind of printer. Prompts for a scanner and copier combo
This is the best I can find an open source printers, It uses an ancient HP black cartridge that's still in production which provides you the heads. The cartridge is pretty cheap.
https://www.instructables.com/Make-a-Handheld-InkJet-Printer-Print-on-ANY-Surfac/
The problem is the ink they use brings more to the table than just being expensive. Unless you intend on using a ballpoint pen plotter or you're going back to Dot matrix, you can't just deliver regular ink to a page. The piezo-electric nozzles need a very specific density and viscosity, It needs to dry at just exactly the right time and be able to be cleaned off the nozzle with the lightest wipe. The ink and the nozzles have 50 years of experience behind them.
Making a head go across the page with precision and high resolution is a very well solved problem, couple of steppers some electronics Legos and a 5-minute Google search you could get that part going. But you're going to have to use somebody's printheads and ink because that's well beyond DIY scope.
Can we get diy perks on this problem
You can use that kind of HP cartridge and also modify it to take ink from a reservoir. It's perfectly possible to buy ink suitable for an inkjet printer in bulk for much cheaper than HP will sell it to you, and that kind of reservoir mod will let you use the print head built in to the HP cartridge.
Sounds possible, but not feasible. Haven't researched it, but my gut feeling tells me that it would be quite expensive if it's not mass produced.
isn't there like a big difference between a printer and a 3d printer? are you really expecting one device to do both?
They are nothing alike and require wildly different mechanical systems.
There have been scattered hobbyist takes on turning a 3D printer into a plotter (a 2D vector-based type of printer) because the moving around in two dimensions a 3D printer does for each layer is the exact thing a plotter would do with a pen on a sheet of paper. Here's one such project.
ah thanks for clarifying