[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,

I'd suggest to write a script (Perl, Python, or your favoured shell)
for use as the backend for the printer, which - besides calling
the original backend - emits the signal or whatever you need to
power on your printer.
This works, as for each job the backend is spawned as a new
process.

Helge