AirPrint in iOS 17.1.1?

May not be related to OpenWrt per se, but I wonder if anyone has had experiences with printing from iPhones to printers (in my case a Kyocera printer), and whether any special settings were needed to make it work? My iPhone 15 sees my Kyocera printer and reports the ink level correctly, but when I hit print nothing happens.

Might there be a workaround like running a printer server on my router that supports AirPrint that acts as a go-between?

I'd recommend looking at Apple and Kyocera's support pages. This should not be impacted by any typical settings for OpenWrt or really any access point, as long as multicast traffic isn't blocked and clients are not isolated.

OpenWrt doesn't have CUPS packaged, as it's rather heavy (rendering on mips, without floating point or anything, that's going to take ages and huge amounts of RAM) - and combined with the necessary PPDs would also take up really a lot of flash space as well, not an option for the typical router.

What OpenWrt does have, would be p910nd, but that's effectively only a USB to network pipe, passing traffic through unchecked (it generally reduces the access your drivers get, but you still need full drivers installed on all clients wanting to print). So I don't think this is going to help you.

Effectively I don't think OpenWrt could help with that situation (a small general purpose linux system with CUPS might, depending on a lot of things), as it's not really involved in the problems now (that's between smartphone and printer, OpenWrt merely provides the network services to them, all the communication happens peer-to-peer between phone and printer), nor can it really decouple the printing services from your printer (p910nd doesn't do that, CUPS is not available).

I'm using a Raspberry Pi for Airprint for my iOS devices, since the old printer only supports bonjour. Easy to setup and works well.

Edit: Sorry, you didn't ask for another device. My bad.

If the printer has Airprint-support, it just works out of the box, once iphone and printer are within the same subnet.

other than that, several printer manufacturers offer iOS app store custom apps for printing to older printers that have no native Airprint-support.

maybe check this older thread as well:

As it happens my Kyocera p3050dn (would highly recommend this printer for anyone with heavy printing requirements) is right next to my main router that has a USB socket. Does that mean I could plug the printer into the router USB socket and send jobs to the router for sending to the printer?

That’s the theory, but it seems with iOS 17 AirPrint is a little picky. My p3050dn supports AirPrint but perhaps an older version (?). I tried upgrading its firmware using a Kyocera firmware upgrade facility but no dice.

I’m new to Apple as my trusty old Pixel 3a started to suffer from limited battery life after five years of faithful service. Before the Pixel 3a I had an iPhone 5c, which also lasted a long time and only failed because apps stopped working given lack of software updates.

Yes... but... this is not going to work with AirPrint. P910nd is, as was previously described, basically a networked version of the USB connection. It's basically a 'dumb print server' in that it doesn't do anything more than pass data from a host to the printer.

I've used p910nd before, and no you can't. You need USB printer drivers available for the device you're sending print commands from, so unless you can get drivers for iOS, not happening. For instance, I had Epson L800 connected to Archer C7 via USB, and on devices such as Windows, I'd install USB driver, but the port for the printer, instead of USB001, it would be C7's IP address.

looks like you are right:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255138651

but then sadly there is nothing, OpenWRT is able to fix. Sounds like the main road to actual success is a printer firmware update for ios17.

Having upgraded the firmware:

and having removed the '-' from the hostname and bonjour name, it seems that I can now print using AirPrint from my iPhone 15. I wonder why the dash breaks things?

That is curious. A good question for Apple, maybe even a bug to be reported there.

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Thanks! :slight_smile:

…and that fixed the problem

Certainly there seem to be many reports that with iOS 17 a printer firmware update is needed to make AirPrint work. In my case, removing the ‘-‘ in the hostname and bonjour name made things work with the updated firmware, but I didn’t try the same with the original firmware. It’s a great thing that Kyocera provide firmware updates even for older models.

iOS more often than needed keeps some weird state data about network devices and sadly even keeps reusing that faulty data, even if it causes conflicts, e.g with such updates. wireless networks, air printers and airplay receivers get identified by name and iOS persists some kind of technical state data associated with the device names.

an iOS network setting reset removes that persisted data (that is not visible on the GUI), sometimes fixing such issues (Not to compensate the situation before the printer firmware, but to provide a fresh start after both printer and iOs got their updates applied).

Removing the dash might have indirectly solved it as well, not because of a potentially problematic dash, but maybe by iOS seeing a new name, thinking it is a new yet unknown printer, not reusing the faulty old device state data and starting with fresh printer connection config.

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