..."
My own methods would also have easily produced this kind of error if you set the threshold for what to consider identical when clustering high enough. But for OCR the risk is somewhat mitigated by people not trusting it to be error-free, and so it can be an acceptable tradeoff if it reduces the overall error rate, but if you're outputting the raw pixel data and let people think it's an unmanipulated image you're begging for trouble.
I unfortunately discovered that my brand new Brother printer can only communicate over 2.4 GHz wifi, which conflicts with the 5 GHz my phone requires (my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed). So USB it is.
It's one of their cheapest inkjets (MFC-1010DW), but I selected it for features more than price. Wish I had read the documentation. I would have purchased the next model up.
Nicely compact compared to the ~10 year old Canon that died recently.
That's abysmal! Every 5GHz Wifi AP I've ever come across lets you run both PHYs at the same time.
Please, on my behalf, sternly talk down to your router.
Even ignoring the massive issue of device compatibility: 5GHz and its protocols do not have anywhere the range and penetrating power of 2.4GHz. When I walk outside my house I can keep watching videos, but my laptop does this by transitioning to the 2GHz radio link modes.
Whenever you replace it, get a separate AP and modem.
Also, DOCSIS 3.1 modems come with queue management. You may benefit significantly from an upgrade even if nothing else changes.
> only 5ghz is performant
Most of these barely need any bandwidth. A printer is possibly on the higher end of bandwidth, but I think the number of printers that support 5GHZ is possibly still single digits.
And/or documented microcontrollers that are purchasable in the states?
Won't 2.4GHz have better range anyway over 5GHZ?
I think that 2.4GHz having longer range is a myth. When I worked on WiFi for Google Fiber we tested it pretty extensively and didn't see any common building materials that attenuated 2.4GHz more than 5GHz. Historically, the problem was that routers often selected low-power channels for 5GHz. If you use a channel where the maximum power is permitted, 5GHz is just as good.
The 5GHz band plan is kind of complicated. You will want to ensure that you get a 160MHz channel. How you accomplish that varies by region, unfortunately.
Oddly the C6 was announced before the C5 I think is only now making it's way onto devkits.
> When I worked on WiFi for Google Fiber we tested it pretty extensively and didn't see any common building materials that attenuated 2.4GHz more than 5GHz.
Huh interesting, I might have to play with that at some point (I'm hoping either ubiquiti or openwrt will let me do that).
There’s some standalone dual-band access points on sale this weekend for <$40 right now which would solve your problem.
Don't be. A comprehensive list of our WiFi-capable devices are two smartphone models, the printer, and two laptops that are plugged in to wired connections.
Edit: Forgot about the two wireless work laptops.
For our purposes the 10 foot USB cable solves the problem fine.
Since Wifi on the printer was not in use at this point, it was then possible to simultaneously connect an additional wireless PC when needed, directly to the printer using the printer's Wifi-Direct alternative.
Interestingly, the printer was connected to the USB socket of a Windows XP client, but I had also ended up adding some Windows 8, 10, & 11 PC's to the network through time.
IT was not optimistic since the new printers have no drivers for Windows XP, plus this was a discontinued model havng no drivers newer than Windows 8 either.
Windows 7 drivers worked fine for XP, Windows 8 drivers worked for Windows 10, so everything was good.
When Windows 11 came out, there was a notice on the Brother website advising that you would need to wait over 30 days before they would be posting compatible drivers.
When they did post the W11 drivers, they were the exact same files that had already been released for W10 years earlier. Apparently the factory only needed to confirm there were no show-stoppers when installed in W11, with no modification of the drivers needed.
All these companies still have their original core competency: Canon still makes optics, Brother still makes home equipment like sewing machines, and Nintendo to this day has not discontinued their playing card products.
Yes, you can buy Nintendo playing cards. I have several sets both modern and older and they’re very good.
These companies think in terms of decades and half-centuries. They may fall trap to occasional trends, but they’re not the ones who rush into a market to innovate; Canon started making a clone of a Leica camera and happened into doing the first indirect X-ray system in Japan, as a single example.
Lego's original core competency was toys, but not plastic ones. The original Lego toys were nearly all wooden, but they gained success with the plastic bricks.
It's unfortunate how many spinoffs they've had that failed.
[1] https://business.time.com/2012/07/23/innovation-almost-bankr...
I got years of use out of a second-hand Brother 2350 printer and then eventually some of the electronics failed. I needed a new printer and I still owned a couple unused Brother toner cartridges. Imagine my joy when I discovered that Brother would sell me a new model that still used the same toner system.
Sticking with the same spartan feature set was fine by me. It's all I need. I didn't even bother looking at the other makers' low-end offerings. Brother's approach of treating printing as a solved problem (Build once; sell often) is so much simpler and more cost-efficient than the super-frisky alternative (Build many times; sell once)
But all that stuff doesn't get in the way of the core feature, network laser printing.
One of the best bits was the no nonsense Windows drivers and easy Linux Postscript compatibility that just worked out of the box.
I was willing to forgive a whole lot of flaws due to it's low price, but it turned out have very few.
In the end it somewhat boils down to pure greed. Instead of stabilizing production costs and/or reusing generic components to ease up manufacturing and repair - HP, Epson, Canon, Dell, Samsung, Kyocera and others try to hype their products with whatever tech stack is currently in trend. "growth hacking" is literally their job description.
There eventually will be a ChatGPT printer on the market. It's inevitable due to what kind of people manage a printer business: It's not the type of people that know how to build printers anymore.