Our friend Sprite_tm has had some time to play a clever prank. Some HP printers have the ability for code to modify what is being displayed on the status screen. This HP Printer Display Hack uses that feature to make a stand alone module that displays some funny comments to the roommate that felt that it was OK to leave a bunch of printers laying around for others to trip over.
For version 2 I think Sprite should put the custom electronics in a D-Sub shell and have a fake broken cable hanging out the end like Evil Mad Scientist Labs did with their USB drive. Another idea would have been to print a page ever 5 minutes saying please put me away. 🙂
"A nice thing about the HP laserjets is that they have a little display, and you can use PJL, a sort of controlling language, to change what’s displayed on it, using a bit of code that runs on a PC. To talk to the Laserjet, I decided on using the Centronics parallel port. For the microcontroller itself, I decided on my good old pal the ATTiny2313. I could have used an other avr, but I’ve got dozens of this type laying around and theyre cheap enough, so I decided on this one."
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This series of printer, and i mean that by THIS design not the literal series of printer, has been dubbed “MONGO” by my networking class, as soon as i heard about this a while ago i put it to always say “MONGO HUNR9Y, MONGO EAT PAPER” because if memory serves right they had some paper jam issues
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You can also do this through software to network attached printers. All that is really necessary is to send the correct PJL to port 9100.
So, just telnet to port 9100 and type this:
\e%-12345X\@PJL JOB
\@PJL RDYMSG DISPLAY=”MESSAGE HERE”
\@PJL EOJ
\e%-12345X
You can read more about it here: http://lifehacker.com/software/office-pranks/change-the-default-message-on-hp-printers-312717.php
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This could be a nice prank.. but hopefully can be used
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This could be a nice prank.. but hopefully can be used in a positive way.