After looking at wireless print servers costing £35+ I decided to make my own using my spare Raspberry Pi Zero (original without camera connector).

I needed a wifi dongle and USB connection for the printer, so have bought a Zero4U USB hub HAT and case, in fact I bought two of each as the shipping was fixed, so it came to £23 shipped from the Czech Rebuplic, so shouldn’t take too long to arrive.

I’ve got a spare 16Gb Class4 microSD card – we’ll have to see how that goes, otherwise I have a 32Gb Transcend on order. I’ve got a 5v 2A power supply and DC jack to microUSB adapter, as I don’t fancy the official power supply (its upside-down and looks fragile).

I’ve got Ralink RT5370 and Realtek RTL8188 wifi dongles on order, although I already have a RT5370 to use, but its nice to have spares that cost a Pound or two!

I installed the latest Raspbian Lite and added cups and sane to the installation.

The printer is a Brother DCP-7055 and I know it works with Ubuntu 12.04/14.04 as it used to be connected locally, however that was using x86-64, I’m not sure ARM is supported by Brother’s drivers, it seems printing at least will work with the HL-1250 ppd file or possibly the 7045N Postscript driver or brlaser, but almost definitely the brscan4 driver won’t work as its x86-only.

I don’t think I can connect a laptop to the miniUSB port on the Zero4U whilst its connected to the Zero, so to scan I’ll have to unplug the Zero from the printer unless Brother can be convinced by my constant tweets/emails to make ARM packages!

In other news my acrylic weld glue and needle bottles have arrived, so got to have a go at assembling the ESP8266 clock cases soon – and Dremel that button hole a bit more.

Update: Brother confirmed no current or future plans to support the ARM platform. The DCp-7500 worked out of the box with Raspbian’s built-in brlaser3 installation and DCP-7030 PPD file. No chance in getting the scanner working though, scanimage didn’t even detect it.

The Zero4U is pretty cool, although the acrylic case is a bit weak, took 5-6 days to arrive. The miniUSB port is blocked by the case so you can’t use it at the same time with a Zero and desktop PC anyway.

I assembled the acrylic case for the ESP8266 clock, it was a bit of a nightmare with the weld solvent, but it went together really well. I even managed to add some rails to make the lid removable.