Comment by MayeulC
9 hours ago
This is something I have been wondering for a while: do custom laser printer firmware projects exist? I'm mostly interested in that to remove toner manufacturer checks, and fix a few annoyances in CUPS and the printers' postscript drivers.
I imagine that is shouldn't be too complicated to support more HW in the agentic age.
I would love to see some of this. Brother is awesome because of how accessible the hardware and toner ecosystem is, but a lot of the older models are security hazards.
Unlike inkjet printers, laser printer controllers can actually cause some damage because of the high power fuser unit. Running the fuser continuously will melt the printer (or at least trip the hopefully hardwired thermal protection), and cycling it on and off rapidly can be unpleasant for other devices on the circuit due to the inrush current.
For some of those devices, they use very bespoke CPUs that are simply not documented publicly.
This but especially for the tracking dots. In the age of LLMs, I doubt it would be that difficult, so long as you don't hit guardrails.
Do laser printers include tracking dots? I thought that was a color printer thing.
We know about the yellow tracking dots.