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