farquea Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 we have 3 laptop trolleys in the school and a printer in EVERY Classroom. I have an idea to mount a printer on top of each laptop trolley therefore the printer will move with the laptops for students to print, meaning we could get rid of A LOT of printers in the process. Is this possible? the printer would have to be connected to the wireless, so i guess a wireless printer would be needed or some sort of wireless AP hooked up to the trolley with the printer connected to this with a cable? and then provisions made for a power plug for the printer as well. Anyone do this, easy to do or are there laptop trolleys designed like this already as i can see it becoming messy with all the cables if i was to try and implement this ourself with our current hardware?
Jamman960 Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 It should be pretty easy asuming the laptops stay with their assigned trollys - using Group Policys or scripts to assign printers based on OU's or computer names, I'd imaging there are examples of both methods around here somewhere You can get wireless printers although I haven't seen a wireless laserjet as yet(haven't been looking for them) but as you mentioned you could stick an AP on the trolley if needed. James
Dom_ Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 You wouldn't need a wireless printer - surely you'll have to plug the printer into a wall socket for power, so just educate teachers/students to plug the network cable in at the same time?
glennda Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 You wouldn't need a wireless printer - surely you'll have to plug the printer into a wall socket for power, so just educate teachers/students to plug the network cable in at the same time? but personally i don't keep non-used ports active - would mean that you would have to connect every socket as you can be 100% sure that they will pick the only disconnected sockets in the building! But i assume its possible as Jamman960 says there appears to be a few printers out there which are wireless but not 100% sure if they are any good!
farquea Posted May 24, 2011 Author Posted May 24, 2011 yeah i could get them to plug in the power and network cable but im worried about the messy cables, as im not sure how the cables would be stored when not in use (i dont want them dangling around). I'd much prefer everything to be incoperated into the one trolley, so the power to the printer coming from the trolley and then maybe just having to plug the trolley in at the wall (which staff normally do anyway) and have the printer wireless either through a wireless printer or plugged into a wireless AP (if this is even possible?)
Dom_ Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 Fair enough - do you have Ruckus? If you do, you can setup mesh networking, and plug the printer into any network point on your Ruckus AP, as long as the AP is in range of another AP you'll get an IP address :-)
pantscat Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 Ruckus APs have additional ethernet ports on them that you can connect devices to - this might be a nice neat solution. Beaten to it!
farquea Posted May 24, 2011 Author Posted May 24, 2011 nope, i have 2 spare 3com AP's but they only have 1 etenret port, and there are 2 ports on the back of my laptop trolleys which ive never really looked at what they can be used for, but i assume one would plug the AP into it and the other would go to a live wall ethernet port, leaving nothing to plug a printer into. A wireless printer i'm worried may be a bit "un-usable" on a g network and crawl with a class of 30 sending documents to it, dont suppose anyone has experience of this though?
JezR Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 Look at something like a Netgear WGPS606 attached to the printer. Laptops print to a central printserver, which passes it to the printer on the trolley.
farquea Posted May 24, 2011 Author Posted May 24, 2011 Look at something like a Netgear WGPS606 attached to the printer. Laptops print to a central printserver, which passes it to the printer on the trolley. good call although id then need a power plug for that too and think it could start to become unmanagebable and more stuff to "go missing" or break as it will all be on show for students on top of the trolley when they go to collect a laptop.
Jamman960 Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 Bandwidth wise it'd depend on the size of the documents being sent to it but that'd apply to a wired printer also - I've seen documents with large pictures push 200mb+ to a printer when printed despite the original document being much smaller, if all 30 laptops were to send such documents at the same time you'd have an issue whether the printer is wireless or not although I suppose at least the data would be on a faster link when heading back from the print server to the printer itself if it were wired. I would always have the printers setup to print via a print server rather than having the pc's interact with it directly, you then have more control over the queues and can install print quota/monitoring software if needed.
sted Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 (edited) brother do wireless lasers. I have seen this setup in one of the schools my company supported (not me personally and we no longer do). Basically the printers was left on the laptop trolleys which were colour coded so green trolley and associated laptops / printer had a green sticker and so on. The printers seemed to work fine (took a bit longer than some wired printers to actually get started from being turned off but not much) and it seemed to work quite happily (though that particulat printer i have used the non wifi version in one of my schools and it was a nightmare kept needing the "overflow" ink chamber emptied and kept rejecting cartridges even originals as far as setting up the printer goes it was just added to the server on port xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx as you would a normal printer client just printed to \\server\greenprinter and the server doled it out to the printer same as any other network printer and deployed in this case via a script but no reason why it couldnt be via ad Edited May 24, 2011 by sted
farquea Posted May 24, 2011 Author Posted May 24, 2011 I've hot glued ours to the printers.! are you actually using this kind of setup then? The printer would be on a print server, its just i had reservations about connecting it to the network wirelessly, i think i'd have to trial it as i'd be worried about the reliabiltiy of it. My main problems is just manging all the plugs and wires on top of the trolley unless i could come up with a way to tidy them away somehow.
farquea Posted May 24, 2011 Author Posted May 24, 2011 brother do wireless lasers. I have seen this setup in one of the schools my company supported (not me personally and we no longer do). Basically the printers was left on the laptop trolleys which were colour coded so green trolley and associated laptops / printer had a green sticker and so on. The printers seemed to work fine (took a bit longer than some wired printers to actually get started from being turned off but not much) and it seemed to work quite happily (though that particulat printer i have used the non wifi version in one of my schools and it was a nightmare kept needing the "overflow" ink chamber emptied and kept rejecting cartridges even originals as far as setting up the printer goes it was just added to the server on port xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx as you would a normal printer client just printed to \\server\greenprinter and the server doled it out to the printer same as any other network printer and deployed in this case via a script but no reason why it couldnt be via ad How were the printers plugged in power wise? to the wall or somehow to the trolley then the trolley plugged in. If in the wall were the power cables just left to hang or what?
sted Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 How were the printers plugged in power wise? to the wall or somehow to the trolley then the trolley plugged in. If in the wall were the power cables just left to hang or what? theres a 4 gang built into the top of the trolley the printer goes into that then the trolley gets plugged into the wall
farquea Posted May 24, 2011 Author Posted May 24, 2011 theres a 4 gang built into the top of the trolley the printer goes into that then the trolley gets plugged into the wall dont suppose you knew the make and model of the trolley do you?
Jamman960 Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 If I remember correctly Bretford trolleys have a 4 way gang on the top
sted Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 dont suppose you knew the make and model of the trolley do you? its probably a bretford but im not 100% sure as to model number no idea i just helped build them
farquea Posted May 24, 2011 Author Posted May 24, 2011 ok thanks for the help so far, so if i can connect a Netgear WGPS606 to the printer i can then join the router to the domain and the printer will function as any normal network printer plugged in the network via a wall port? Might need to do some in-house modding to mount the printer and a power strip though and hide all the cabling!
sted Posted May 24, 2011 Posted May 24, 2011 sounds about right as long as the server can ping/talk to the printer via wireless (however its set up be it a wifi printer a a rj45 to wifi adapter etc) then to the server its just a n other device (preferably with a static/reserved ip
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now