Turning a USB printer into a network accessible device
Raspberry Pis are fun. You can do a lot of cool things with them. For that matter, there are some really lame educational albeit non-utilitarian projects out there. To be fair, this project doesn't really require a Raspberry Pi, but the small form factor of the Raspberry Pi makes it ideal. I chose to use a Raspberry Pi Zero W. So what's the project? Turn an all-in-one printer/scanner into a network accessible device. I should make it clear that I run Linux OSs. As such part of what I have written here probably won't apply directly to the Windows crowd. How does it work? The approach here is twofold. The printer can be shared with CUPS from the PiZeroW, so that part is rather trival. Sharing the scanner over the network is the less trivial part, though not horribly complicated. To accomplish this, I used usbip which provides a way to share a USB device over an IP network. Hosting a USB devices with the usbip server introduces a new problem. When usbip is hosting the d