Linux and the Brother HL-2270DW printer: success!

This printer was remarkably easy to setup under Linux.  It was something of an impulse buy after my inkjet ran out of ink... and after I clicked "Checkout" I thought to check what Google had to say about the support for Linux.  There were no great success stories, so I thought I would have to fight with it for a few weeks to get it to a decent state...  Surprise!  It took only a few hours, of which most were me exploring the device.

I setup the printer on the network using ethernet (the wireless is nice, if I need it later... but for now it's sitting next to the router, so...) and for sanity I set it to get the same dhcp leased IP address (the lazy man's static).  The Printers dialog in Fedora 14 quickly discovered the printer after I opened the Network arrow, which was really cool.  I found out, via Wireshark, that it has some kind of webservice broadcast thing as well as a SNMP method of discovery... oh, and netbios.  There's probably a few I'm missing...  oh yes, dns-sd/avahi and LLMNR... anyway, the network support built-in to this printer really impressed me.

I actually ended up selecting IPP printers and entering the URI manually rather than choosing the automatically discovered one, which had a URI like: dnssd://Brother%20HL-2270DW%20series._ipp._tcp.local/  Entering it manually seemed to give me a few more options and even detected the toner level (well, kind of- I think the "starter" cartridge screws it up... we'll see after I print my way through it).  The URI I used was: ipp://$IP/pcl_p1 and the driver I chose was "Generic PCL Laser Printer" with the Duplex option checked.  And it's worked perfectly since then!!  How awesome is that.  I didn't even have to install any of the semi-GPLv2 software from Brother.

In short, I would recommend this printer to anyone that's looking for a full-featured (black/white and single-function) and yet not way too expensive laser printer.  Especially if you can find it on sale for $79.99 like I did :-)

Update 16 Aug 2012: load nf_conntrack_snmp to auto-detect the printer in Gnome 3's printer dialog.
# echo "install nf_conntrack_snmp" > /etc/modprobe.d/brother_hl2270dw.conf

update your xbee firmware under linux!

I just got a pair of xbee radios from Digi (http://www.digi.com/xbee/) last week, as I begin my hobby of embedded electronics, and they're very cool.  I already have a ton of ideas that, given time and money, I want to work on.  The only thing that bothered me was that there was no firmware update utility for Linux.  Well, no more!  The datasheet from Digi had the details of how to enter the bootloader and upload firmware to the xbee, and I spent the past few nights learning about serial communication and programming.  The result is a small utility that can upload new firmware images to your xbee!

As of now, there are a couple of caveats (that will all eventually be fixed):

• the device is hard-coded as /dev/ttyUSB0
• you can only program an xbee currently in AT mode (you can go to API mode fine, but my utility doesn't speak API yet)
• need to handle radios in strange states or non-default baud rates, etc.

I only have 2 radios to test on, so: FLASH AT YOUR OWN RISK!  This works for me, but I'm sure that there will be situations and hardware that this will not work on (for now).  That aside, the xbee bootloader seems fairly robust, and when I accidentally re-programmed the same block several hundred times, it was able to recover.

I'll edit this later after I find a place to put my code...
Edit: https://github.com/roysjosh/xbee-comm

And now, the text equivalent of a screenshot!

$ time { ./xbfwup 2270/ebl_files/XB24-ZB_2270.ebl ; }
Read 100608 byte firmware file (786 blocks).
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Programming complete, running uploaded firmware...

real    0m25.392s
user    0m0.023s
sys     0m0.042s