I’ve got a great, economical but long in the tooth old commercial grade laser printer (quite literally rescued from a skip!). Its cheap to run and great quality, but because of it’s size it hides in the pantry. However, the trek to the pantry with the laptop, before plugging it into the usb and finding somewher to delicately balance said laptop in the overfull little room is getting a little old. Can I upcycle it by adding gubbins? or would my efforts be better directed at making a little laptop shelf in the pantry…

Edit; it’s an HP CP2025 if that is of any relevence.

Apparently a Raspberry Pi can do this, I have the magazine article in front of me and plan to start work/play tomorrow 🙂

does it have a network port ?

powerline kit would probably see you right

does it have a network port ?
powerline kit would probably see you right

Well, grazed knuckles and swearing has resulted in me being able to say, yes, it does! Whats a powerline kit then?

You can get wireless print servers. They come under various names, might be wireless print adapter, hub, kit, etc.

That printer has an Ethernet port by the look of the specs, so another option is to wire it to your hub/router. It will still be seen by other wireless devices on the network.

If you don’t want to trail an Ethernet cable to the router you can get a wireless access point and I think you can set it up as a bridge so it connects to the main wireless network.

^ oh and yeah as in above posts, a Powerline kit is an alternative. Basic one with just Ethernet socket, not wireless. It’s then just sending the Ethernet signal down the power cable and the other end you have another Powerline adapter connecting Ethernet to the router.

I had an RPi running as a wireless printserver, plugged into a normal printer via USB for quite a while. Worked fine. I could find the details of what I did, but you’d be better off searching as doubtless it’s all been updated now.

Many thanks all; thats given me something to go on.