Warning: strpos() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given in /volume1/web/wordpress/wp-includes/blocks.php on line 20 Warning: strpos() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given in /volume1/web/wordpress/wp-includes/blocks.php on line 20 Warning: strpos() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given in /volume1/web/wordpress/wp-includes/blocks.php on line 20 {"id":2619,"date":"2017-10-23T13:27:10","date_gmt":"2017-10-23T13:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/home.worldofwills.uk\/Home\/?p=2619"},"modified":"2021-01-15T18:06:51","modified_gmt":"2021-01-15T18:06:51","slug":"raspberry-pi-print-server","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldofwills.uk\/wordpress\/2017\/10\/23\/raspberry-pi-print-server\/","title":{"rendered":"Raspberry PI print server"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve wanted to sort out our home printing set-up for some time. We have a Canon printer which is connected via a USB cable to our desktop PC so whenever we want to print from the Mac we have to boot up the desktop. Our printer is not a network print server.
I’ve owned a RaspberryPi model ‘B’ since they were first sold, but had done precious little with it. It’s too low powered to be used as a real desktop and to use it so I would have to have another screen, mouse etc.
There is a really useful toolset called ‘Buildroot’ which allows a user on a Linux system to cross-compile and build a customised and very small  boot image for a very small computer, such as the Pi, so I downloaded the tools and played around to see what it could do.
There are some excellent tutorials on embedded Linux and Buildroot on the free-electrons<\/a> web site which I pored over for many hours and after some playing managed to configure ‘Buildroot’ to build a dedicated printserver to run on the PI and offer printing to the other computers in our home network. The boot image is less than 150Mb so fits easily on a 256Mb SD card.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Pi is now powered by the printer so when we switch the printer on, the PI automatically loads up and makes the printer available on our home network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is the PI in its multi-coloured case, note it’s not much bigger than a credit card as can be seen below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Raspberry Pi Model B, the original RPI<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Raspberry PI computers are just brilliant. They retail from just under \u00a310 and run Linux. Using Buildroot<\/em>, you can create super low cost dedicated devices such as print servers, DNS servers, etc etc that attach to your home wireless networks. Just brilliant!.,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is what I did to make it all work:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Download Buildroot to my Linux desktop and produce a configuration for the PI:\n
      \n
    1. mkdir piB; cd piB;<\/em><\/li>\n
    2. ln -s ~\/’<\/em>buildroot directory‘ buildroot <\/em><\/li>\n
    3. make -C ..\/buildroot O=$(PWD) raspberrypi_defconfig<\/em> to create the default configuration for the Raspberry Pi model B.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>
    4. Modify the configuration to point to overlays, user table, patch, post-build, post-image directories<\/li>
    5. Enable udev, dropbear, busybox, tinyhttpd, p910nd, kmod,<\/li>
    6. Modify config nodename.<\/li>
    7. Create overlay files for fixed IP address, printer startup, modules-load.d to enable usblp.<\/li>
    8. Modify the printer startup script (S90printer<\/em> in my case) to create the lock directory \/tmp\/lock\/subsys <\/em><\/li>
    9. Remove all the unnecessary graphics, sound etc stuff found in the default configuration.<\/li>
    10. Build the config using make<\/em>.<\/li>
    11. Copy the configuration to SD card using ‘dd<\/em>‘ with something like:sudo dd if=images\/sdcard.img of=\/dev\/sdh ; sync ; sync<\/em><\/li>
    12. Put the SD card in the PI and power it up.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

      Then, set up printing from the client computers. The PI printserver uses p910nd to listen on the network for print requests. Clients should access it at: socket:\/\/IPADDRESS:9100<\/em>. To make this all work from the Mac I had to load the Gutenberg Canon printer drivers onto the Mac as the standard Apple Canon drivers do not work across sockets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Loads of good info on p910 can be found at p910nd<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

      It all works a treat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      I’ve wanted to sort out our home printing set-up for some time. We have a Canon printer which is connected via a USB cable to our desktop PC so whenever we want to print from the Mac we have to boot up the desktop. Our printer is not a network print server.I’ve owned a RaspberryPi … Continue reading “Raspberry PI print server”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldofwills.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldofwills.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldofwills.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldofwills.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldofwills.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2619"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worldofwills.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4973,"href":"https:\/\/worldofwills.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions\/4973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldofwills.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldofwills.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldofwills.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}