Money donation to fund test printers?

[jekader]

I've been following development of this driver for a while. Looks like progress is currently constrained by the fact that the author does not own an LBP printer and nobody else is familiar enough with the protocol.

Used LBP printers are dirt cheap nowadays. I want to check in if there's any interest from the author to purchase a couple to perform testing and further driver development. If so, I'm willing to donate money to cover the costs. If there's more of us we can potentially afford the whole range of LBP printers - of course if there's a closet large enough to house them.

Regards,
Evgheni

[mounaiban]

Hi, this is not Alexey, but I thought it was a good idea. I haven't really asked @agalakhov about this, but I think a lack of time on his (and most of the other contributors') part is probably the biggest constraint.

I am under the impression that most of us don't feel the urgency to work on this driver, due to how the printer market has moved on. Low-end printers already support wireless printing as I am writing this, and wireless printing support is usually tied to mandatory support for standard protocols (so-called 'driverless' operation).

Canon seems to be still selling new LBP2900 printers in India though, so our original cause isn't completely lost yet...

Personally, I am in this because I see CAPT as a mystery. Why did Canon implement a strongly bi-directional printer control protocol? How are unidirectional protocols insufficient? And why on Earth did Canon split responses at the 6th byte? This project has been going on for over 7 years, so we might as well solve the mystery for good. 👻

[erosenst]

I think I can help to bring access for canon lbp7200c. Sending unit is maybe too expensive, but I own some public ip:s so I can setup some amd64 machine capable to run virtual machines and private network card for printer network. Maybe some usb cam to look printer tray and keep setup up say ½ year or something? Maybe someone else can do same for other models?
Ofcourse it need you to promise that don't do anything evil with that machine..

@mounaiban is it good idea?

[mounaiban]

@erosenst I like that webcam idea, it could be used during the first stages of support for each model, especially for verifying presence of the first output and auto duplexer/2-sided printing support. The driver has to be stable enough to no longer need regular power cycling first though.

Some things, like checking multi-tray support and print correctness are still best done in person.

The VM-private network idea sounds pretty viable for studying things like status checks.