Why Aren’t We Hacking On The LED Printer?

Strings of LEDs are a staple of the type of project we see here at Hackaday, with addressable devices such as the WS2812 in particular having changed beyond recognition. They’ve appeared in all kinds of projects, but are perhaps most memorable when used in imaging projects such as screen-like arrays or persistence-of-vision systems. There’s another addressable LED product that we haven’t seen here, which is quite a surprise considering that it can be found with relative ease in junk piles and has been on the market for decades. We’re talking about the LED printer, and the addressable LED product in question is a very high density array of LEDs the width of a page, designed to place an image of the page to be printed on the toner transfer drum.