Raspberry Pi Print Server

I am having troubles with my Brother laser printer. I does not want to wake from sleep, I have to hard reset the printer any time I want to print anything. It seems to work fine from USB, but I have the printer tucked away downstairs and do not want to have it in my office with me, as the toner tends to off-gas while printing. I realized I have a Raspberry Pi laying around and could use it as a server to the printer’s USB.

Operating system

I have become a fan of light operating systems, there is something satifying about seeing low system usage when you start a machine from scratch. For SBCs I tend to lean towards DietPi.

Software

We are using CUPS for the printer server and my printer is the Brother HL-L2390DW. To start I installed the drivers for my printer on the Pi. Then I installed CUPS with:

sudo apt install cups

sudo cupsctl --remote - any # make service available over the network
sudo servicectl restart cups # restart service to apply changes

Setup

The CUPS interface is now available at: https://<pi-ip>:631. You can now use the interface to add the printer and make it available to your network.