Resurrecting an Old Konica-Minolta Bizhub C203: Part 1

Praying for the Printer according to Dall-E

The Problem of an Obsolete Printer Considered

I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold all is vanity, and vexation of spirit. The perverse are hard to be corrected, and the number of fools is infinite, and photocopiers never work. (Eccl. 3:14-15, and a bit).

While printers, I would like to posit, are the bane of humanity’s existence, destroyers of peace, and a haunt of demons ¹ I also love printing. In a former life I worked in graphic design and my family has had its fair share of artists and artisans—typographers, sculptors, photographers, architects, carpenters—and thus creating Beautiful Things (TM) is close to my heart. While there are reasons not to like them, I still get a huge amount of satisfaction out of a nicely printed funeral service sheet, for example, purely for its æsthetic value, and for lending some extra dignity to the celebration of Mass. And with the scarcity of certain obscure liturgical books and the entirely reasonably attempted ban on officially publishing new books “of a certain kind” by some kind and wise men residing on a peninsula in the mediterranean, high quality domestic production of materials has become an interest. But I digress.

For it happened that when I took up a new position earlier this year I found that the parish was in possession of an aged Konica Minolta BizHub C203 printer-copier. It’s one of those big photocopier/printer/scanner/fax machines that take up an entirely reasonable amount of floorspace in a Presbytery office. It was explained to me that this machine has a noble history: it served at two organisations before its time came up to obsolidificated. But its lease had been paid, it was in good working order still, and so it was offered to the parish for free, provided we carry on with the surprisingly favourable contract for its upkeep with one of the local business supplies firms. And so we were given this aging machine for free and in good working condition, and there was much rejoicing.

And then, Windows 11. A sudden lack of drivers meant that the parish secretary no longer could use it for colour printing, so a Solution was found in purchasing another printer, a colour inkjet, that could produce the colour sheets required on occasion, which could then be taken to the BizHub which still functioned well as a colour photocopier.

I love giving things a new lease of life, and so I made it my mission to resurrect the BizHub C203.

CUPS has saved me on a number of occasions in the past under similar circumstances. It’s a brilliant printing system that is used in most Linux and all Apple distributions; you can use it pretty much on anything that has PCL support, and it will print something, even in cases when it cannot access all the functions of a machine. But of course all the Presbytery computers ran Windows 11 by now, and since I did not appropriately predisposed internally to deal with that weird Linux subsystem that you can now somehow access in Windows I gather, I thought I would just get a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and hook it up to the USB and expose the printer over the network via CUPS.

But it was not to be, because of the global chip shortages and sanctions and general messabouting which, at that time, meant that for months and months and months there was a global shortage of a LOT of electric parts, and Raspberry Pi’s were absolutely nowhere to be found, apart from eBay, where hawks were selling them for an arm and a leg.

Fortunately these SBC’s now come with a gazillion Chinese and non-Chinese knockoffs; some of them actually much better and beefier than the originals, they are just named after different fruits. So after browsing AliExpress I picked an OrangePi Zero 2W as the alternative: same form factor and pins, runs Debian just the same, but is actually better powered, and most importantly: it is available.

This was to be my foray into microcomputing, which I wanted to get more into ever since—as the end result to a problem brought about by a chain of unforeseen consequences to Apple’s decisions about Safari—I bought a Beaglebone Black to run PiHole at home and realised that Node.JS can be a viable option to Make Things Do Things. But I have flashed an image onto an SD card before, and I have had that tiny bit of experience. Naturally this gave me all the confidence in the world that I can resurrect a photocopier.

So off I went to AliExpress and did some shopping, and in an entirely reasonable amount of time, a parcel arrived from China, which meant that I could start hacking the parish. And this is where I shall pick up next time.