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Connecting a printer (Brother 2240) to a Raspberry Pi 4 | Jan-21-2020 (Happy Birthday Mom!)

(Turn your phone sideways if you are on mobile)

It is neat to be able to send things to the printer from any machine within the network. Saves some steps, saves having to connect the printer USB to your machine. A better reason is: great to learn a little bit more about the amazing open source tools we have at our disposal.

PiMyLifeUp (link below) is a great resource. I've started following them on Twitter and it has been great to see new articles.

I followed parts of the tutorial[0] on PiMyLifeUp. The model for the printer I have (Brother 2240) didn't show up in the CUPS admin interface, but you can get the PPF file from a source[1] listed below, follow the instructions there and things should work.

Workflow

## Copy from local (your machine) to remote (the pi), place it in `~` on the pi
$ scp file_on_my_local_machine.pdf pi@192.168.0.42:.

## Copy from remote to local (just to show how this would work)
$ scp pi@192.168.0.42:/home/pi/dev/file_on_the_remote.txt new_file_name.txt
pi@192.168.0.42's password: # I entered the password correctly

## Once you moved the file to the pi, you can ssh into it and print it:

## ssh into the pi and print
$ ssh pi@192.168.0.42
## it will ask you for your password. If you don't have a password, STOP
## EVERYTHING and go set one. If you password is "raspberry" (the default), STOP
## EVERYTHING and go change it.

## Select the file and print
$ pi@raspberry:~ $ lp article_on_the_remote.pdf

Resources

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Thanks for reading, PDG

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