Tree Carvings

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Taken along a trail at the Suwannee River State Park.

This park took quite a beating from Hurricane Idalia, and four months later, many trails remain inaccessible.

Another Foggy Sunrise

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Taken along the southern end of (Madison) County Road 53.

For this new year's sunrise, I had the brilliant idea of watching the sun come up over a solar farm under construction a few miles from my woods. Unfortunately, not unlike the last two, the fog was so thick we could barely see the road!

There was only a few minutes when the solar disc was visible through the fog before it got too bright for further photos. Two hours later, the solar farm (and my woods) are still shrouded in fog. It's a shame, because the clouds in the sky would have made for an spectacularly colorful sunrise..

Happy Holiday Panoramas

DNP's DS620 and DS820 (and Citizen's CX-02/CX-02W) printers have a cool feature where they can create a large panorama print by stitching together up to three smaller ones. This can take the form of discrete panels with a white border between them, or better yet, blend adjacent panels into each other to produce a truly seamless continuous print.

In principle this overlapping/blending is straightforward, but getting it right can be pretty tricky, to the point where DNP only exposed this functionality in a proprietary library/SDK (and their HotFolder utility) instead of their normal driver packages.

After a several year hiatus from hacking on DNP printers, I'm happy to say that I've independently implemented this continuous panorama functionality, and it shows up as just another print size in a print dialog, operating at the post-color-correction YMC layer.

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The DS620 with a 6x24 discrete panel panorama, and an 6x20 continuous panorama, from a sunset photo I took over the Indian River over twenty years ago.

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It took a lot of prints to get it right! 89 6x8" panels were expended before I finally figured out how to work around a printer firmware bug that kept glitching the edge of each print.

Once the DS620 was working reliably, I turned my attention to its larger sibling, the DS820, which can generate a seamless panorama of up to 8x32" (and up to 8x36" unblended)

I only used up about 15 prints worth of media, most of which was wasted before I figured out that the DS820 bizarrely doesn't support panoramas with A4 media.

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An 8x18" print of a stitched photo I took of the (now-former) Aricibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, along with an 8x32" print of about a quarter of a full 360 degree sunset skyscape I took out at Wallaby Ranch about a year ago, with the 6x24" DS620 print off to the side for comparison.

While the DNP models are confirmed working, the Citizen CX-02 and CX-02S might need some additional tweaking, as they do differ slightly from their DNP siblings and I don't have access to those.

All of the panorama code is is now committed into Gutenprint. Aside from eating up my most of my free time for about a week, getting this development exercise consumed about $75 worth of media -- 92 6x8" prints, 9 A4 prints, and 5 8x12" prints. Suffice it to say, if you find this functionality useful, donations to the cause are appreciated!

The nice thing about the way this is implemented is that the panel splitting and blending code (and data tables) should be trivially adaptable to other printer models, such as Mitsubishi's CP-D90DW and Kodak's 8810, 6900, and 6950. Unfortunately, this sort of effort requires a lot of hands-on time with these printer models (along with media) and that's not likely to happen anytime soon.

Happy printing, folks!

Sony UP-D711MD

A few days ago, I committed support for the Sony UP-D711MD thermal printer. There's not much to say about this little thing beyond the basic specs; it uses 84mm thermal paper and is used in all sorts of scientific and medical contexts. It operates at 300dpi, unlike the 325dpi of Sony's other thermal models.

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I figured it would be appropriate to use a medical image for this test. Say hello to Dracula, my ex-wife's constipated (ex-)Iguana.

I didn't exhaustively test the UP-711AD's options but it works well enough to move it off my desk.

If you wish to use this printer, you'll need a Gutenprint snapshot dated on or after 2022-10-26.

I'd still like to add support for the UP-9xxAD series of printers to complete the Sony thermal set, but they're too expensive to qualify for lowball impulse eBay bidding, and most of my attention these days is going to meatspace projects.

As always, happy printing.

2023-10-29 UPDATE: It's the UP-D711MD, not 771

Mitsubishi CP-W5000 (and other updates)

Not unlike the last time I wrote about anything printing-related, it's been a while. Most of my attention has been spent on meatspace tasks (like finishing the tick farmhouse!) but it's now time for a status dump.

The main news is full support for the Mitsubishi CP-W5000, including both sets of cutters and duplexing support. This printer was Mitsubishi's swan song before their exit from the printer business, and brings aobut the end of an era.

Also gaining proper support is the old Fujifilm ASK-2500 aka the Nidec Copal DPB-7000. It turns out it uses the same command language as the older Sony models, so there's clearly some shared ancestry. The ASK-2000 (DPB-6000) and ASK-4000 (DPB-4000) will benefit from this, and should JustWork(tm) once I get the USB VID/PIDs for them.

The minilab-focused DNP DS480 and DS680 models were added as variants of the Mitsubishi CP-D70 family. I've never seen one for sale on its own, but one can still find media on eBay.

All of these additions were done without physical access, relying on interested third parties to provide sniffs and testing, so I don't have any first-print photos to show for any of these.

Preliminary support for the HiTi P310 and P320 series also landed, but in true HiTi fashion they're different enough from everything else that more development is needed before printing is expected to work. This was done in anticipation of someone sending me these printers, but they ghosted me.

Also added is preliminary support for the Fujifilm ASK-400, a rebadged version of the Citizen CX-02 (and DNP DS620). Once I get the requisite USB IDs it should JustWork(tm).

For existing printers, the HiTi P520/P525 and P461 saw notable improvements, and the older Canon SELPHY CP models landed a fix for a serious regression that prevented printing on most media types. Bringing up the rear is the ability to update the firmware of most DNP and Citizen models (and their various rebadged variants).

Looking to the future, there's still quite a long todo list on my issue tracker, but most of those tasks are on hold as I simply lack access to the the printer hardware or are basically an exercise in hardcore binary reverse engineering.

Along those lines, if someone from inside HiTi or Kodak Alaris could get in touch with me with documentation that would help out a great deal, but barring that, the best way to help is to send a printer my way, preferably with some money tucked into the box.

Happy Printing, folks!

The Tick Farm Family is Growing!

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Spotted next to my office door; shot handheld with a 100mm macro lens.

Actual size of each of these dog ticks is about 2x4mm.

...A female typically lays 4000-6500 eggs in a season. Suffice it to say I'm not pro-life.

HiTi Prinhome P461

It's been a while since I've talked about anything printing-related. That's mostly been due to not a whole lot happening, but lately I got the bug again, and not-so-coincidentally actually have a place to set things back up again!

So, as of a couple of days ago, the HiTi P461 is now working under Linux:

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There are still some quirks -- I don't have matte mode and HQ mode working just yet, but that's a matter of obtaining some more sniffs once I have local access to a Windows PC again.

In related news, several bugs relating to the HiTi P510 series and P525 have been fixed this year, and they're confirmed working. Reverse engineering work on the v2 Heat Tables continues slowly.

Additionally, since my last printer-related update, the Kodak 605. Canon SELPHY CP1500, and DNP QW410 have seen improvements. All of this is committed to upstream Gutenprint, though the HiTi data files will have to come out of the selphy_print repository.

As always, donations to the printer fund are highly appreciated, and if there's anyone reading this with a line into HiTi, I'd welcome a dialog.

Happy printing!

View from my Office

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This time of year, I get to see the sun set at the end of my workday at start of my ~75 meter commute back to the house.

...It's nice to have a dedicated office space again, but having it tucked away in such a beautiful place is.. heaven.