For home use, HP LaserJet M1005 MPF Printer cum Scanner is the best option in terms of value for money. In our case, the printer was gifted to my Dad by my elder brother around 4 years back . The rationale for gifting was based on my Dad preference of reading from hard copies rather than from the screen. And to true that, my father has loved the gift and used it to the fullest. Infact till date, he has iterated n number of times that it is the best gift which my brother has given over the years :P. With that history in picture, this printer has had a very important role in our lives.
The only one drawback in my view which the printer had was the lack of wireless printing. The limited usb wire mandated that the printer and the laptop be in close proximity and it led to unncessary clobbering in the room near the desk and also added inconvenience of moving the laptop/printer here and there. If the printer would have been wireless it would have had been soo much more easier! And thus began the hunt to resolve this need..
The only one drawback in my view which the printer had was the lack of wireless printing. The limited usb wire mandated that the printer and the laptop be in close proximity and it led to unncessary clobbering in the room near the desk and also added inconvenience of moving the laptop/printer here and there. If the printer would have been wireless it would have had been soo much more easier! And thus began the hunt to resolve this need..
After digging the internet, I came to know that for old printers which lack the wireless printing functionality, various vendors provide an option of wireless print server attachment. On amazon, there were a couple which I found:
1.TP-Link TL-WPS510U 150Mbps Pocket-Sized Wireless Print Server
2.J7951G HP Jetdirect ew2400 Wireless Print Server J7951G
But neither of them seemed to explicitly mention whether they support this printer and in my view were pretty expensive ranging from 5k-20k INR.
Latter, I came across some DIY implementations , where people have used raspberry pi as a print server. And this caught my eye! I too had a raspberry pi which I had not used since couple of years and I thought rather than lying in the closet why not deploy it for our printer upgrade.. I followed the steps mentioned in this link:
https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-print-server/
Unfortunately, it did not work out of the box for me - which was infact my gut feeling given that this was a relatively old post.
There were two issues primarily:
1. The HP printer model driver was not listed in the CUPS list. I tried various other drivers listed and gave a test print page from the menu to check if it worked. Unfortunately, even though it would show that the job completed, the printer never received the print command. So it seemed like I need the exact driver for my printer. For this I digged up the internet and found below from openprinting:
http://www.openprinting.org/printer/HP/HP-LaserJet_M1005_MFP
I downloaded and installed foo2xqx drivers on my raspberry pi and restarted the cups service. And voila, the hp model HP LaserJet M1005 showed up on the list :) . I selected it and gave the test print page and it worked!
1.TP-Link TL-WPS510U 150Mbps Pocket-Sized Wireless Print Server
2.J7951G HP Jetdirect ew2400 Wireless Print Server J7951G
But neither of them seemed to explicitly mention whether they support this printer and in my view were pretty expensive ranging from 5k-20k INR.
Latter, I came across some DIY implementations , where people have used raspberry pi as a print server. And this caught my eye! I too had a raspberry pi which I had not used since couple of years and I thought rather than lying in the closet why not deploy it for our printer upgrade.. I followed the steps mentioned in this link:
https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-print-server/
Unfortunately, it did not work out of the box for me - which was infact my gut feeling given that this was a relatively old post.
There were two issues primarily:
1. The HP printer model driver was not listed in the CUPS list. I tried various other drivers listed and gave a test print page from the menu to check if it worked. Unfortunately, even though it would show that the job completed, the printer never received the print command. So it seemed like I need the exact driver for my printer. For this I digged up the internet and found below from openprinting:
http://www.openprinting.org/printer/HP/HP-LaserJet_M1005_MFP
I downloaded and installed foo2xqx drivers on my raspberry pi and restarted the cups service. And voila, the hp model HP LaserJet M1005 showed up on the list :) . I selected it and gave the test print page and it worked!
2. From my windows 10 laptop, the samba setup did not work. Firstly, the printer did not get auto-discovered in the network tab for me. So after reading online, I gave the network path explicitly in the file manager : \\xxx.xxx.xxx.xx\ and to my suprise it opened up and showed the printer available. Even though the steps mentioned went smoothly without any errors, somehow the printer would not respond when the request came via the samba server. I digged up a little more online and I came across another alternate setup on how to add a network printer.
http://blog.pi3g.com/2013/08/using-the-raspberry-pi-as-cups-print-server-for-windows-and-apple-mac-airprint/
I followed from the steps from Ïnstall printer on Windows¨. The difference here primarily was using the path of the cups printer page and mentioning the connection explicitly . For my case, this was https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:631/printers/HP_LaserJet_M1005
The setup again happened as previously but this time it worked and the test page print command from windows went though...
http://blog.pi3g.com/2013/08/using-the-raspberry-pi-as-cups-print-server-for-windows-and-apple-mac-airprint/
I followed from the steps from Ïnstall printer on Windows¨. The difference here primarily was using the path of the cups printer page and mentioning the connection explicitly . For my case, this was https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:631/printers/HP_LaserJet_M1005
The setup again happened as previously but this time it worked and the test page print command from windows went though...
It took my entire afternoon to get this up trying multiple times from various sources and digging various forums but at the end of the day when you hear the distinct sound of the printing started - triggered remotely, it gives pure pleasure and satisfaction to the core. Hope this post serves as a reference for others and saves an afternoon down to getting up and running in an hour :).