The fixed march of technological innovation can go away in any other case perfectly-usable units orphaned by means of lack of drivers. What are you able to do when your working system stops supporting your favourite printer? Sub in a Raspberry Pi, as software program developer Herman Õunapuu demonstrates.
“A member of the family has a Canon PIXMA MP250 printer, initially launched in 2009. It has been a really dependable piece of {hardware}, particularly for a printer,” Õunapuu explains. “Then got here Home windows 10. The printer wouldn’t work out of the field with it and the official drivers acquired caught throughout set up. Twiddling with the printer in system supervisor, making an attempt to put in drivers through Home windows Replace and stars aligning acquired the printer to work once more. Then got here Home windows 11. Nothing I did might get it working now, and the printer isn’t even formally supported by Canon on this model of Home windows.”
When Home windows has deserted your printer, there’s just one resolution: deploy a classic Raspberry Pi. (📷: Gareth Halfacree)
Whereas Canon could have stopped growing new drivers for the ever-shifting goal that’s Microsoft Home windows, issues have been totally different on the open-source aspect of the fence: drivers included as normal with most Linux distributions supported the printer out-of-the-box, and had executed for years — however with Õunapuu’s member of the family pressured into utilizing Home windows with the intention to assist a proprietary software for which no usable various was out there, that wasn’t a lot assist. Or was it?
“Fast searches on-line recommended that I might flip this printer right into a community printer, so long as I had some endurance and a spare laptop,” Õunapuu writes. “The concept is easy: take a spare laptop, hook it as much as the printer, set up CUPS on it, configure it and also you’re good to go! I initially examined this setup with a ZimaBoard operating Fedora Server, however the closing resolution used an outdated Raspberry Pi [Model] B+ operating the newest model of Raspberry Pi OS.”
The Raspberry Pi Mannequin B+’s single-core processor is weak by fashionable requirements, however nearly as much as the duty. (📷: Herman Õunapuu)
That “outdated Raspberry Pi” is, certainly, classic: it is from Raspberry Pi’s first main {hardware} refresh, which introduced within the now-standard 40-pin general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header however retained the single-core ARM11 processor — sufficient to run the printer, Õunapuu discovered, although with the CPU pegged all through the print job. “For those who don’t thoughts a slower printing velocity, then any Raspberry Pi will likely be completely OK,” he advises. “Extra performant variations of Raspberry Pi will probably fare even higher.”
Õunapuu’s information to turning a Raspberry Pi — or different Linux-based single-board laptop — right into a print server is out there on his weblog.