Open Printer
www.crowdsupply.com
Finally, an open hardware printer you can actually understand, repair, and upgrade

I stumbled across this link in the comment of another post, and thought it was super promising!

Someone mentioned something about in the US, this would be illegal due to DRM laws - not sure about the specifics of this, but regardless an open source printer seems like something we’ve needed for ages, as printers are something that always seem like way more of a headache then they need to be. It seems like such a simple technology that has existed for quite some time, but they are always such a pain to deal with. (Maybe it’s just my bad luck with printers?)

  • UnfinishedProjects@piefed.zipOPEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    I understand why you’re getting downvoted, but at the same time - I completely understand the sentiment. In a perfect world, you’re right, we should be able to reuse what we have and our society is utterly obsessed with consumerism. But being realistic and practical - that’s not going to happen for many reasons, at least not in our lifetime.

    But I think that creating something that will last, is repairable, and open source is a step in the right direction and is better than the current alternatives. I’m not saying we shouldn’t continue to advocate and push for the ideals of what you are saying - but we shouldn’t push away progress in the right direction as we fight for those ideals. It doesn’t have to be “one or the other” it can be a multipronged approach that advocates for the ideal scenario while accepting small incremental progress as well.

    I’m not saying this specific product is or is not the solution (it might be a terrible product or the people behind the product might have terrible intentions, idk. . . But the idea of products build to last, be repairable, and open for improvement, etc etc is a good step forward in my mind. Ehh, my 2 cents.