The days after christmas there is the big post-x-mas sales here. I imagine it’s the same everywhere.

This year we bought a doll house for my doughter . My wife passed some old doll house furnitures along so it didn’t feel to empty. But then I got the idea that why not print some small paper dolls of the family that Clara could play with in the doll house. One problem though, as I only have a black and white laser printer I thought it would be a little dull. Unless I bought a cheap color inkjet printer on sale.

Said and done. I looked in all the ad papers we received after christmas and found a suitable candidate. Flexible, cheap and available close by. HP Photosmart Wireless e-All-in-One Printer - B110a on sale at Siba for 890 SEK . It also has a scanner and can be connected over wifi.

I unboxed and hooked it up and then started to test it. Neat, it even worked with my iPad. But the scanner felt so slow. There is a couple of ways to scan with it and the fastest way seemed to be to access it through a web interface. But this too required a couple of manual steps to handle.

The best way for me would be to have some small program with a big button on it to initiate a scan and the scan is then saved to a file automatically and the scanner is available to scan a new page immediately.

Well, the web interface communicated with the printer over http and it was pretty easy to sniff the protocol with Wireshark . The interesting parts was sent with XML so from that I wipped up an own little command line tool that can initiate a scan and get the scan from the printer. As I based it on my previous XML parser The XML Runner it’s been added there. This works much easier and faster.

Feel free to have a look at the code at github

Side note: I also bought a Buzz Lightyear doll on sale as it was so damn cheap link

Classic Pixar Scene