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

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 30 April 2009, Helge Blischke wrote:
>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
>
Oh oh..   Something just got hairy.  I was thinking of setting up a time delay 
to shut it off when done, but multiple jobs might get to scrapping over it.  
Humm...  I'll have to check with the heyu folks on that front I imagine.  Time 
delayed shut offs I believe are handled on a from last event basis.

Thanks Helge.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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