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Dedicated to splitting water with sunlight
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Driver information
This may be old news to y'all, but the situation for "hacking" the drivers looks hopeful....
If anyone wants to tackle the programming/driver aspect of things, HP has made the Linux drivers open source. They're at:
http://hplipopensource.com/
According to this page:
http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/models/photosmart/photosmart_d5400_series.html
The printer is supported by the "DJGenericVIP" device class.
According to this page:
http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/tech_docs/device_classes.html
The "DJGenericVIP" device class supports "Single Pen Printing" which I take to mean that, should the driver be reprogrammed appropriately, we could force the printing of one color at a time, avoiding any unintended metal nitrate deposition. As well, you can force the printer into using a higher resolution (1200x1200 according to driver documentation, although spec sheets indicate even high resolution, see below) via the driver. Maybe we can get more volume on the substrate that way.
Here's the spec sheet by HP:
http://h50146.www5.hp.com/info/feature/experiencehp/consumer/pdf/HP_Ziggy_Tech_Backgrounder_en.pdf
If we could get a real programmer to work on this, I bet Linux printing would be the way to go. Maybe we could come up with a Knoppix-like CD with our custom drivers pre-loaded, so we could boot Linux from CD without installing anything to a hard drive.
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Billy McCulloch
Ozerov Research Group
Texas A&M University
More information
According to HP, the printer supports the PCL3GUI mode, which is a subset of PCL capable of only printing raster graphics, so the computer does all the grunt work.
http://www.printersupport.net/assets/hp_printing-imaging.pdfWikipedia has a brief overview of PCL (Printer Command Language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_Command_LanguageAnyhow, it looks like PCL3GUI is not officially documented, and the aforementioned open source drivers may provide the most insight, if anybody is up to reading some code (I think it's all Python and C++ code).
It may also be possible to make a program which just dumps a document directly to the USB port, avoiding the use of CUPS or other higher level interfaces. The following page provides a reference for PCL, and has a specific section pertaining to the use of RTL (Raster Transfer Language) which is what PCL3GUI really is.
http://www.undocprint.org/formats/page_description_languages/pclI've found the official HP document describing RTL, it's 540 pages long, and it's 10 years old. On the up side, the section dealing with RTL explicitly is only 120 pages. Presumably, the printer is fully compatible with this version of RTL, but I think some of the parameters will require trial and error fiddling to figure out (such as telling the printer to use the CD tray for printing).
http://www.hpmuseum.net/document.php?catfile=213I've "printed" to a file and am examining the output in a hex editor. It looks like the printer uses PCL3GUI (aka RTL) wrapped inside of PJL. PJL is Printer Job Language, and HP has it well documented (see links below).
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/bpl13208/bpl13208.pdfhttp://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/bpl13207/bpl13207.pdfIf anyone want to collaborate on this, let me know. I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to this, but I would like to help.
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Billy McCulloch
Ozerov Research Group
Texas A&M University
Has anyone found a driver alternative?
Has anyone been able to find an alternative driver? We have been testing different printing templates lately. We have found that the RGB settings for magenta, green, and blue are [255,255,0], [255,0,255] and [0,255,255] respectively. However we only have control over these colors when we create .png templates and print them on paper using normal print quality. If we print using a .jpeg, best quality, photo paper loader, or CD/DVD loader then the printer automatically alters the ink output (it puts a little cyan in the magenta). This is a problem since FTO is printed using the CD/DVD loader.
You should be able to avoid
You should be able to avoid inclusion of random colors in your patterns by using a lossless compression scheme such as PNG.
Are you saying that even using PNG for the CD/DVD, you still observe inclusion of colors that shouldn't be there?
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Billy McCulloch
Ozerov Research Group
Texas A&M University
Thanks!
Thanks for letting me know. I didn't know anything about this. I will see what I can do in terms of getting this going.
Jenny