+++ /dev/null
----
-layout: post
-status: publish
-published: true
-title: Saving power of powerful printers
-author:
- display_name: xro
- login: xro
- email: xro@realraum.at
- url: ''
-author_login: xro
-author_email: xro@realraum.at
-wordpress_id: 1032
-wordpress_url: http://wp.realraum.at/?p=1032
-date: '2018-07-01 17:14:46 -0500'
-date_gmt: '2018-07-01 15:14:46 -0500'
-categories:
-- realraum News
-- Projekte
-- english
-tags: []
-comments: []
----
-<p>At home, my Samsung laser-printer uses 15W during standby. So, a few years back, in order to save power, I put it on a USB-controlled power-plug. Pretty soon I added a tiny script that would query cups if a print-job was queued and would switch the printer on and afterwards off again. It turned out to be a pretty effective power saving measure.</p>
-<p style="height:150px;">
-<img src="http://wp.realraum.at/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/usbpowerswitching-300x148.jpg" alt="usbpowerswitching" width="300" height="148" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1035" /></p>
-<p>Our two very big and reliable printers at realraum were even more power hungry, so I wanted to to something similar for the space.</p>
-<p>Using the hardware I had on hand, I cobbled together the following:</p>
-<p>* A BeagleBone Green to act as cups print-server and to run the python scripts.<br />
-* An empty 230V power-plug case, housing a 5V power-supply (for the BB) and a small opto-coupler isolated relay to switch the plug.<br />
-* A second power-plug case with a second small opto-coupler isolated relay.</p>
-<p>While there is a lot of room for optimization, like a leaner BeagleBone image and better housing for the power-plugs, printing- and power-saving-wise it works very well.</p>
-<p>As always you can find our <a href="https://github.com/realraum/printerbone" title="Code on Github" target="_blank">code on Github.</a> Stay tuned for updates.</p>
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