PRE-LAUNCH
OPEN HARDWARE / INKJET / PARIS / CROWD SUPPLY, AUTUMN 2026
THE PRINTER
YOU OWN
A repairable inkjet on a Raspberry Pi that prints from a paper roll, runs on one cartridge, refills without DRM, and asks you to wait for a price.
Every printer sold in the last twenty years was designed to be replaced. Openprinter is designed to be kept. A Raspberry Pi Zero W runs the open-source print server CUPS, an STM32 drives the cartridge, the plastics are 3D-printable, the frame is folded sheet metal, and the cartridges are the cheap HP ones you can already buy at a pharmacy. It prints from Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone and Android with no driver from anyone.
Two things separate it from every other inkjet. It takes a paper roll, 11 inches or 297 mm wide, up to 37.5 meters long, and cuts it to any length. And it prints with one cartridge, so an empty yellow never stops a black page. We reviewed the public spec, the site, and both Crowd Supply updates. No unit is in hand. Price and speed are still unannounced.
THE CASE
A ROLL CHANGES WHAT A PRINTER IS
Sheets are a habit. A roll with a cutter makes a receipt printer, a label maker, a banner press, a ticker and a zine machine out of the same grey bar. Open Tools shows to-do lists, a stock-sale flyer, a wall chart and a full contract page coming off the same spool. Lift the roll off its two arms and the slot takes A4, A3, Letter or Tabloid sheets. The whole thing is 50 by 10 by 11 centimeters without the roll, and a wall kit hangs it on a post with a wire tray underneath so the desk stays clear.
The cartridge choice is the quiet engineering win. The HP 63, 302 and 803 family puts the printhead inside the cartridge. When a head clogs, and inkjet heads always clog, you replace a fifteen-dollar part instead of the machine. There is no chip handshake to refuse a refill, and Open Tools will sell 100 ml bottles and a refill kit. A control board with two seats, marked BLACK and COLOR, lets either sit alone.
THE DOUBT
"OPEN" IS DOING SOME WORK
The files are promised under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. That is a generous license for a hardware project, but it is not open source by the OSI definition, and the non-commercial clause means nobody else may sell a part, a kit or a fork. Open Tools has also filed a patent and a design registration. And the files ship only after the "final version," to avoid inconsistent copies in the wild. All of that is defensible. None of it is open today. What exists today is a promise of openness from a team that has so far kept its promises.
The spec sheet has one wobble. The site lists Wi-Fi 802.11ac on a Pi Zero W, a board that only does b/g/n. Ethernet was on the June roadmap and is absent from the September spec. Speed has read "to be defined" all year. And the whole design rests on HP continuing to make one cartridge family. Integrated heads survive a handful of refills, not an infinite number. None of these are reasons to walk away. They are the questions we would ask before paying.
"NO PROPRIETARY DRIVERS, NO CARTRIDGE DRM, DESIGNED TO NEVER BECOME OBSOLETE."
— OPEN TOOLS, CROWD SUPPLY PROJECT PAGETHE PROOF
A REAL PROTOTYPE, NOT A RENDER
The June update reports black and full-color printing, sheet and roll handling, and a working cutter, with ink drying, nozzle cleaning cycles, dithering and design-for-manufacture still on the list. The September update says beta testers have units and the campaign opens this autumn with pricing. Bpifrance and SATT Lutech are backers, ENSCI is the design school behind it, and the printer is nominated for two French Design Awards. XDA, Hackster and Geeks Are Sexy have covered it. Three names are on the team page.
Crowd Supply is the right venue. It holds funds, handles fulfillment, and has shipped a long line of open hardware. It also means this is a pre-order for a machine that does not yet exist in volume, from a first-time hardware team building an inkjet from scratch. Read the updates before you read the tiers.
SIX COLORWAYS · KIT OR ASSEMBLED · PRINT YOUR OWN SHELL IF YOU LIKE
THE CHANGE
THE MISSING PERIPHERAL FOR A TOWN THAT PRINTS A WIRE
PointCast publishes numbered blocks to a wire. A machine on the wall that prints the wire onto paper, one block per morning, cut to length, is not a gadget for us. It is the peripheral we did not know we were waiting for. Mount it by the coffee pot. Feed it the register. Banner the drum count on a Friday. A printer that outputs strips is a receipt printer, a ticker and a zine press at once, and it belongs to the same argument as everything else here: land, not locks.
So we support it, and we will say so when the campaign opens. We will hold the words "open source" until the files are public. We want a price and a pages-per-minute before anyone here puts money down. And we would like the spec sheet to say b/g/n.
POINTCAST REVIEW LAB · PUBLIC-SPEC FIELD REVIEW
THE VERDICT
4.1/5PROS: Paper roll with an integrated cutter. One-cartridge printing. Printhead-in-cartridge refills with no DRM. CUPS, so no vendor driver on any OS. Folded metal, standard motors, 3D-printable plastics. Wall mount. Six colorways. Real prototype, real backers, two honest updates.
CONS: Price and speed unannounced. CC BY-NC-SA plus a patent is not open source, and the files are withheld until after launch. 802.11ac claim on a b/g/n board. Ethernet vanished. Everything depends on HP's cartridge family. No scanner. First hardware product from a three-person team.
BOTTOM LINE: The first printer in twenty years designed to be kept rather than replaced. Back the direction when the campaign opens, hold the word "open" until the files are public, and wait for the price.
