I needed to connect an old printer to a raspberry, because the printer is so old that there are no windows drivers anymore. Because I also use HA, it seamed feasible to use Cups with HA.
There is an “old” manual on how to set up a local usb printer with cups. Unfortunatly, Portainer is nowadays not supported any more.
However, I still got it set up, and because it was quite a hazzle I want to share my solution. Hopefully, it helps somebody.
- Add the repository with portainer support:
- For this, go in Homeassistant into “Settings - Addons - Add-on-Store”. Then click the 3 dots on the upper corner, and under “repositories” add:
https://github.com/alexbelgium/hassio-addons.
Now it could be that you have to restart HA to load these addons
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Now install the newly available Portainer addon and start it. For that, you have to disable Protection in the settings.
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Login to Portainer: the user ist “admin”. The pw “homeassistant”. Now you can setup Cups as a new container. For that, use this manual. I changed here the docker image from the hub to
ydkn/cups:latest
because the given image did not have a driver for my printer.
Now you should be able to access cups via http://localhassip:631
- This Cups version does not let you add new printers from outside the system (-> the website). So you have to change the config-file. For that go into the newly created Container, select “Console” and connect to it:
There is no file editor installed, so you have to install it by typing the commands:
apt-get update
apt-get install nano
now you can edit the config file by typing:
nano /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
And add DefaultEncryption IfRequested after DefaultAuthType Basic.
Save with “CTRL-S” and close it with “CTRL-X”. Now you can add your Local USB Printer in Cups through the website.
- To add this Printer to Windows, i set it up as as “shared” inside Cups. Then, in Windows I add a printer manually and add it with the url from cups. For me, it was
http://192.168.0.89:631/printers/OKI_DATA_CORP_C3100
I use the Microsoft PS Class driver, however it only prints black and white, althought it should be able to print in color.