[cups.general] Probably silly Q, certainly a bit off topic :)

[Helge Blischke]

Gene Heskett wrote:

> Greetings all;
> 
> I have a Brother HL2140 printer, a B&W laser, that is about 50x faster
> than
> any of the power miserly ink squirters are.  Unforch, it needs about a
> kilowatt to start it, and it idles at 150 watts or so just keeping the
> heaters ready.
> 
> I am reasonably familiar with the x10 stuff, and could probably use an
> appliance module to control its line power via heyu, which is already
> installed & running.
> 
> This printer is not normally installed in this room as it was bought to be
> used with my coco3 via some scripts I wrote that intercept jobs sent to /p
> on the coco3.
> 
> So my question then is:
> 
> Is there way to get a signal out of cups when _this_ printer has a job,
> that would tell heyu to turn it on?
> 
> There are other printer profiles here that should not send this trigger.
> 
> Thanks for any hints.
> 

Gene,

the simplest way to do this is to write a litle script (using Perl,
Python, or your favoured shell) that, besides calling the
original backend, spits out whatever signal you need to start up
he printer. Use this script as the backend for the printer.

Helge