This Open-Source Printer Ditches Cartridge DRM, and 3D Printing Should Notice

The cartridge scam comes to 3D printing

If you have ever owned an inkjet printer, you know the routine. The hardware is cheap. The ink is where the company makes its money, and it guards that income with firmware that refuses third-party cartridges. Bambu Lab caught flak for bringing a version of this playbook to 3D printing with RFID-tagged spools, so the debate is not theoretical for this community.

A small Paris-based team thinks the answer is to build a printer that never asks for permission in the first place.

Meet OpenPrinter

OpenPrinter is a working prototype led by mechanical engineer Leonard Hartmann, with backing from Bpifrance and the design school ENSCI. It runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero W talking to an STM32 microcontroller, uses standard HP ink cartridges that happen to be refillable, and prints through CUPS, the open print server that already powers Linux and macOS. There is no proprietary driver to install.

The trick is not a clever hack. The firmware simply never checks for an authentication chip. It does not look for an official HP signature before it prints, so a refilled cartridge works without a fight. Black and color run on separate paths, which means running out of cyan does not stall your black-and-white documents.

Promising, with caveats

OpenPrinter is not a product you can buy. It lives on Crowd Supply, but the campaign page is not live yet. There is no price, no ship date, and no confirmed speed. The team has shown it printing in black and color on cut sheets and rolls, and it picked up a France Design Awards nomination. Call it a proof of concept with momentum.

There is one contradiction worth noting. The hardware and firmware are meant to be published, but under a non-commercial license, and Open Tools has filed a patent on the design. That is an odd fit for a project built around openness, and the community will be watching how that plays out.

Why this belongs on a 3D printing site

The lesson is direct. When a manufacturer controls both the machine and the consumable, the user loses leverage. HP settled multiple lawsuits over firmware that bricked third-party cartridges. Canon once shipped toner without the chip and told customers how to bypass the warning, quietly proving the chip was never about print quality. The same dynamics show up when filament spools carry RFID tags that only certain machines will read.

OpenPrinter will not replace your Bambu or your Prusa tomorrow. But it is a clean example of what ownership can look like when the firmware stays out of the way. As 3D printing consumables get smarter, the community has a choice about which side of that line to stand on.