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by bArray 26 days ago
> With Openprinter, you are free to choose between standard sheets or a roll of versatile paper.

A few other comments have concentrated on the printer head and ink cartridge, but the roll vs sheets interests me. Manipulating sheets of paper is actually quite a difficult problem to solve - and there is only a demonstration of paper placement. Loading page after page is actually really not easy at all. There is no example of it printing.

I see they got a nomination for a design award [1], which in my personal experience has been a negative signal for successful projects. On the same page they mention that they also mention that they don't even know how much this will cost yet:

> We know this is your most frequently asked question! Final pricing depends on a moving puzzle of production volumes, BoM costs, industrialization expenses, regulatory certifications, and final engineering developments.

On the crowd funding page it mentions for parts [2]:

> Main board: Raspberry Pi Zero W

> Cartridge board: STM32 MCU

Not a specific MCU variant, and the specifics of the Pi variant (i.e. RAM) are not mentioned. I would expect these parts would be locked in by now. I have a feeling that this is not quite as ready as made out - I think there is still R&D going on.

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer/updates/...

[2] https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer

2 comments

> specifics of the Pi variant (i.e. RAM) are not mentioned

I agree with the rest but Pi Zero W is a specific machine with 512 MB RAM:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/

It's also the one everyone can buy online for $19, not Pi Zero 2 W (always out of stock)

> I agree with the rest but Pi Zero W is a specific machine with 512 MB RAM:

I thought they came in different variants - my meat-based LLM must have hallucinated it.

> It's also the one everyone can buy online for $19, not Pi Zero 2 W (always out of stock)

I get the impression that they don't actively manufacture Pi Zero W anymore and it's all old stock. Rapid for example say they have an availability of 761 (at time of writing) [1], but are those all within Rapid's control, or what is reported at Raspberry Pi's remaining stock? If you sell 1k printer units, can you put a Pi Zero W in all of them?

Compute modules are probably a bit more reliable and there is some capability with other modules, specifically the DDR2 form factor ones [2] (which is my favorite form factor). For example, ClockWork sold their own compatible compute modules [3].

[1] https://www.rapidonline.com/raspberry-pi-sc0020-zero-w-singl...

[2] https://www.rapidonline.com/raspberry-pi-compute-module-cm3-...

[3] https://www.clockworkpi.com/shop

Pi Zero seems overkill to me for a printer.
It costs $20 and comes with wifi and bluetooth. Seems like a valid choice to me.
An ESP32 is way cheaper and has Wifi and BLe as well. I updated a label printer with an ESP32-S3 to add wifi[1] and it has plenty performance. It is even available with dual-band wifi 6[2]. Most processing is done outside the printer on the sending party anyway.

[1] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/making-a-label-printer-wo...

[2] https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-c5

They are largely sold out, especially at quantity. Not something I would currently be looking to base a product on.