I have a problem, which can only be solved with over engineered solutions...

Specifically, I have two desk lamps, as well as a fan with smart WIFI power plugs I normally turn off and on using my phone. The problem is I've stopped charging my phone in my bed room to remove one more distraction before going to bed.

So - how do I now turn off/on the lights/fan in my room if I don't have a conveniently located switch? With an ESP8266 of course!

This guide differs from others on ESPEasy in that it covers actions based on both a short button press, and also a long button press triggering a different action.

In the first part of this guide, I'm going to cover:

• What is ESPEasy and how to compile and install it within Arduino IDE
• Adding in the "long push button" feature plugin
• Adding a simple push button switch to an ESP8266
• Sending actions to an MQTT server

In part 2 I cover what's required to get actions from ESPEasy generated MQTT messages triggering automations within Home Assistant

Introduction

The ESP8266 is a dirt cheap microcontroller (~ $2-3USD from Aliexpress) with WiFi and at least two usable GPIO pins (for things like switches or temperature sensors). It comes in multiple variants with Wikipedia covering a good overview of the range of options. I personally recommend either the NodeMCU or Wemos D1 mini as both can simply be powered and programmed via microUSB, contain a number of usable GPIO pins, and don't require other hurdles like converting power down to 3.3V such as on the ESP-01. 

For those new to Ardiunos and the ESP2866 who fear getting stuck in C code and other low level programming languages, there are few good options for new comers which aren't so scary. In this case, ESPEasy is a great starting point.

What is ESPEasy?

ESPEasy is a GUI based operating system for the ESP8266 and its bigger brother the ESP32. It comes with a plethora of features and functionality, offering great versatility around working with all different sorts of sensors and relays.

I really like it because it means I don't have to have multiple different Ardiuno IDE projects for different IoT devices with only specific tasks around the house where I forget the detail of the code of each project. Instead I can use the browser based GUI on each ESP to perform tasks with the different types of sensors connected to each device.

How to compile and install with Arduino IDE

Firstly why?

My conundrum is I want one push button switch to perform multiple tasks. Specifically:

• Short press will trigger the two lights off/on with MQTT
• Long press will trigger the fan off/on with MQTT

If you only want one action i.e. short button press triggering an action, then the default compiled binaries of ESPEasy is more than fine for this purpose. However, if you want a second action based off a long button press, you need a plugin detailed here, which needs to be compiled into ESPEasy.

Regardless of either option, I recommend installing a pre-compiled version of ESPEasy first to ensure its working on your ESP8266.

Compiling

I referred to the ESPEasy documentation here.

Some thoughts after following the docs:

• If you've already got Arduino IDE installed, don't bother re-downloading and installing it. Instead, copy your Ardiuno IDE install directory somewhere outside of "C:/Program Files" to make a portable version. This is because you can then install the required ESPEasy libraries in the new location without impacting any other Arduino IDE projects relying on similar but different version libraries.
• When downloading the firmware from https://github.com/letscontrolit/ESPEasy/releases, it comes with two folders, lib, and source.
  • Copy the contents of lib into the libraries folder within the portable copy of Arduino IDE.
  • Inside source there is another folder called src. rename the src directory to ESPEasy. Note: The letter case matters!
• Open Arduino IDE from the portable version, and then load ESPEasy.ino from within it
• Try compiling ESPEasy first before trying to upload it to the physical hardware.

Download long button press feature

ESPEasy has a bunch of user-contributed plugins which may or may not be considered stable or tested, and can be downloaded here: https://github.com/enesbcs/ESPEasyPluginPlayground. A number of stable plugins already come with ESPEasy in the previously download source files.

In our case, the long button press feature _P159_Pushbutton.ino has not yet reached the stable state. Download it from github and add it to the "ESPEasy" directory created earlier.

Making the plugin work in ESPEasy.

Unfortunately the plugin docs are not entirely correct and there was a couple things I had to do to make it work.

In line 13 of _P159_Pushbutton.ino, the plugin is currently in the testing phase. This means we need to enable PLUGIN_BUILD_TESTING support in ESPEasy.ino. We also need to define _P159_Pushbutton as part of PLUGIN_BUILD_TESTING in define_plugin_sets.h

In ESPEasy.ino:

// Define globals before plugin sets to allow a personal override of the selected plugins
#include "ESPEasy-Globals.h"
#include "define_plugin_sets.h"
// Plugin helper needs the defined controller sets, thus include after 'define_plugin_sets.h'
#include "_CPlugin_Helper.h"

++//build all the normal stable plugins
++//#define PLUGIN_BUILD_NORMAL
++
++//build all plugins that are in test stadium
++#define PLUGIN_BUILD_TESTING
++
++//build all plugins that still are being developed and are broken or incomplete
++//#define PLUGIN_BUILD_DEV

Technically all we need is #define PLUGIN_BUILD_TESTING however I have the others above commented out for context. We could include all 3 but depending on which ESP8266 you have, it may not have enough flash space.

In define_plugin_sets.h:

// TESTING #####################################
#ifdef PLUGIN_SET_TESTING
#define USES_P045 // MPU6050
#define USES_P047 // I2C_soil_misture
#define USES_P048 // Motoshield_v2

...output omitted...

#define USES_P078 // Eastron Modbus Energy meters
#define USES_P079 // Wemos Motoshield
#define USES_P080 // iButton Sensor DS1990A
#define USES_P081 // Cron
++ #define USES_P159 // Pushbutton
#endif

Re-compile ESPEasy and upload it again to the ESP.

Verify plugin is available

Boot the ESP8266 and verify the Pushbutton plugin in available in the GUI.

If you have a serial monitor enabled while booting the ESP8266, you also see the plugin types loaded:

309 : INFO : Plugins: 47 [Normal] [Testing] (ESP82xx Core 2_4_2, NONOS SDK 2.2.1(cfd48f3), LWIP: 2.0.3)

Configuration

Configuring "Switch input - Pushbutton" in ESPEasy

At this point our plugin is installed and available. Now its time to actually connect a switch, and make it do something.

As previously mentioned, I want my push button to turn my lights on/off via MQTT with a quick button press. If I press the switch for a couple of seconds, instead I want via MQTT to turn my fan off/on.

To do so, I've configured my Pushbutton like so:

Notes on above:

• Give the device a name and obviously enable it.
• Because I have the switch connected between the GND pin, and D6 on my ESP, I need to enable "Internal PullUp". When the switch is pressed it detects this through the pin being pulled HIGH.
• Choose how long you want the button to be pressed for a "long press" to be detected.
• You'll note "Send to Controller" is not selected. This is because we will do this using "rules" later on.
• Assuming you only have two actions (short or long), configure two values with a relevant name for each. Also change decimals to 0. When we get the MQTT event, 0 will be OFF, and 1 will be ON.
  • Note: I think there's a bug and I had to have #1 configured with switch as the name. Will explain more in rules section.

Are we done? Not yet! Now we need to configure "rules" to make all of the above work.

Configuring Pushbutton Rules

Rules provide further granularity in device configuration, and provide an extra level of "smarts".

You can find more info on the ESPEasy wiki here.

First we need to enable Rules support. Do this by Tools > Advanced > Rules. Make sure "Old Engine" is also enabled (only required if you're running a recent daily release of ESPEasy). Click "Submit" at the bottom to save this.

We now have a new Rules tab. Select this to begin creating our rule.

If you're following the guide, and have configured things exactly as per the screenshot above, the below config will work:

on switch#Shortpress do
event,preparedatalight
endon

on switch#Longpress do
If [switch#fan]=0
taskvalueset,2,2,1
Else
taskvalueset,2,2,0
EndIf
event,preparedatafan
EndOn

on preparedatalight do
Publish %sysname%/switch/lights,[switch#switch]
endon

on preparedatafan do
Publish %sysname%/switch/fan,[switch#fan]
endon

So what's this doing?

• The plugin defines two variable types of shortpress or longpress. We match on these event types and then define what to do with them in the preparedata light/fan sections.
• My understanding is "switch" refers to the global variable of switch (the top "switch" in yellow in previous screenshot), however in practice I noticed the bottom "switch" in yellow also played an effect. If I changed the latter, the above code would not trigger, so I've simply left both as "switch"...
• event tells it to process the specified event
• with switch#Longpress we use an if statement to determine whether the fan is currently off (0) and then turn it on with taskvalueset. If it is already on, we turn it off with the alternative taskvalueset.
  • taskvalueset,x,y,z is used to set the value with a specified action. The short press already has off/on toggle defined within ESPEasy and doesn't require this extra logic, but we do require it for the longpress since this isn't a native feature.
  • x - This is the device number in the list of sensors from the "Devices" tab. If you only have 1 sensor, make this 1.
  • y - This is the device sub-value number. In the previous push button screenshot, "Switch" is 1, and "Fan" is 2.
  • Z - 1 = ON, 0 = OFF
  • Finally we trigger event preparedatafan to fire off an MQTT event with the long press result.
• preparedata light/fan use Publish to fire off the desired MQTT event with the switch's state of 0 or 1. We will configure our MQTT server in the next section.

MQTT Configuration

Now that we've configured our rules, we need to define a server to point them at.

In my case I'm running Mosquitto on my Ubuntu Server. This is as simple as:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y mosquitto mosquitto-clients

ESPEasy MQTT config

Below is my configuration. ESPEasy has a number of different protocol options, and I read somewhere that "OpenHAB MQTT" is a good option for Mosquitto. Of main importance here is Controller IP address (your server's IP) and the port MQTT server is running on. Mosquitto by default uses 1883.

Verify MQTT config is working

We can use mosquitto_sub to see all MQTT messages our server may be receiving. To do so, issue the following command:

matt@server:~$ mosquitto_sub -v -t #
/ESP_Easy/status/LWT Connected

-v enables verbose output while -t # subscribes to all MQTT topics.

Finally - let's try our switch!

matt@server:~$ mosquitto_sub -v -t #
/ESP_Easy/status/LWT Connected
ESP_Easy/switch/lights 1
ESP_Easy/switch/lights 0
ESP_Easy/switch/lights 1
ESP_Easy/switch/lights 0
ESP_Easy/switch/fan 1
ESP_Easy/switch/fan 0
ESP_Easy/switch/lights 1
ESP_Easy/switch/lights 0

Great - We now have MQTT events for OFF/ON which can be used with our desired Home Automation tool to pass the events!

Conclusion

In this guide we covered ESPEasy and the flexibility it provides for ESP8266 IoT devices as a simple [over engineered!] wifi push button switch. We looked at how to compile ESPEasy from scratch and also get plugins working within it. Finally, we configured our push button to send MQTT messages based off different short/long press events.

In part two, I explain how to take the MQTT events and configure Automations (actually turning the lights off/on!) within Home Assistant.

I hope you've enjoyed reading this, and you found this guide useful.

Preface

For years, I have backed up photos from my smart phone using Dropbox.

My primary purpose for this other than backing up my photos is because all images are backed up with the following file syntax:

YYYY-MM-DD HH.MM.SS

E.g. 2017-05-01 15.01.44.jpg

After a couple of years having photos backed up like this, I found it super handy for sorting all my photos, and undeniably one of the best features of the Dropbox phone app.

For the first few years this was great as I had about 8GB of free space, but then I hit the free storage limits..

Personally I find Dropbox's prices a bit ridiculous (I really don't need 1TB in the cloud), so I opted for a year of Google Drive.

However, I faced a new conundrum. Google Drive does not rename the phone's photos when they upload. So what am I to do?

Alas, for several years I've just moved my backed up photos from Dropbox to Google Drive….yep, not pretty.

However, after finding a similar new problem where I'm now backing up photos from my mirrorless Sony Camera, I face the same problem…What to do…

Some would ask, why not just use a python script or something to rename your photos, but I haven't come across anything from a quick google search, nor did I want to write my own.

So - this brings me to discovering Advanced Renamer. 

Introduction

Advanced Renamer is a pretty self-explanatory tool for renaming files in bulk.

It has a ton of flexibility, and I was happy to find it can do exactly what I'm after without too much effort.

Features

• Image renaming with EXIF support
• Use GPS information from image files
• New name with Tags
• Use imported TV Show data when renaming
• Use Regular expressions and Wildcards

For more specifics, you can refer to its documentation: https://www.advancedrenamer.com/user_guide/ 

Renaming pairs of RAW and JPG files

Folders which contain different types of files with the same name can be "paired". In the case of RAW and JPG files, Advanced Renamer can be configured to rename based on the time in the JPG source for both the JPG and RAW files.

Start Advanced Renamer, and select your source directory of files to convert:

This will load your images like so:

I then configured the following method to get my photos in the same naming format:

<Img Year>-<Img Month>-<Img Day> <Img Hour>.<Img Min>.<Img Sec>

To configure this, navigate to "Add Method > New Name", and paste in the above like so:

Advanced Renamer then shows a preview of the expected new file names before committing to any final change.

Click "Start batch" to rename all the files.

Renaming RAW photos only

Directories which only have RAW images, using the <img> tag does not seem to work. Thankfully, Advanced Renamer has support for pulling in information from third-party tools, such as SpiderMonkey, MediaInfo, ExifTool, and Icons8.

In our case dealing with RAW images, we can rename our photos with Dropbox-like photo syntax by doing the following steps:

First import the directories of your RAW images. To get an idea on what EXIF data we can match on, select one of the images and click "ExifTool…"

This is useful, as it provides a number of different fields we can match on:

In my case, I'm matching on "DateTimeOriginal".

Copy the Tag above, and close ExifTool.

Create a new rename method by selecting "Add Method > New Name". Paste the above syntax like so:

While this has now put the date and time in the correct order, it has used underscores through the whole file name. Gross!

Let's fix this with a second rename rule.

Thanks to some RegEx help, I was able to get the formatting in just the way I wanted.

To do so:

Add a "Replace" method after the existing "New Name" and select "Use regular expressions".

Text to be replaced: _(\d{2})_(\d{2} \d{2})_(\d{2})_
Replace with: -\1-\2.\3.

Advanced Renamer also has some further useful documentation on using RegEx here:

www.advancedrenamer.com/user_guide/regular_expresions.

Tip: If photos have the same name (e.g. same time stamp), you can configure a "Name collison rule". As above I have "Append number" selected.
 

Conclusion

As seen above, with relative ease Advanced Renamer can be super handy for renaming files such as images in bulk and ease. :-)

This post is for those running a Microsoft DNS Server

This is a stupid thing that has been bugging me but I never really made the effort to look into it. I used to know how to do this since I actually did a Microsoft course that covered DNS yet I just couldn't remember how to set this up properly.

So you're in your web browser or you want to ping a device on your network and you only want to put in the hostname, without the FQDN. Turns out it's very simple.

Open up DNS manager (Start > Administrative Tools > DNS)

What you want to do is right click Reverse Lookup Zones, and click New Zone.

Click Next.

Depending on how you have DNS set up (say you have more than one MS DNS server) you may need to configure this differently, but I imagine you'll probably be the same as me, which is selecting "Primary Zone", and "Store the Zone in Active Directory" ticked > Next.

Again, choose the Zone Replication that suits your AD/DNS set up, Next.

Choose IPv4 or IPv6 reverse lookup. Hopefully a no brainer for you.

Now we're finally at the screen that matters. This is where you put the IP subnet where your Forward Lookup Zone resides in. As you can see above, my domain is mattie47.lan, which has devices just in the 192.168.0.0/24 subnet. I believe you will need to do a Reverse lookup zone for each subnet you want to resolve to that has devices in, so go through all these steps, finish, then start again for the next subnet (I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm right...).

Click next once you've filled it in. The next screen again will be specific to your set up. Finally click finish.

For me, things just worked, but you may need to set up pointers (either double click each Host A record, and tick the box, or go under your new reverse lookup zone > right click > New Pointer.

Hope this helped someone!

Back in May I built a new computer which included a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H motherboard. All was well till I tried getting the audio drivers working correctly. At that point in time, I discovered if I wanted to use headphones say out my front audio jack, I would be forced to turn my stereo off first, as sound would go out both audio jacks at the same time.

This was incredibly frustrating, since I was upgrading from a motherboard that I could choose between front and back audio, and I simply used an AutoHotkey script that would switch between the two using an assigned key on my keyboard.

At the time, I upgraded to the latest Via HD audio drivers, hoping that would have a fix for the situation. Unfortunately not.

Thankfully, I've just done a Google again on the situation and came across this thread. Turns out the VIA drivers released some point in August fixed the issue. So If you're reading this post and you haven't updated your drivers, you can download the latest VIA version from Gigabyte here.

Speaking of AutoHotkey scripts, below is mine, which is basically a script to assign which audio device is the default. So to activate it, I would need to press Ctrl + Alt + A, which in itself isn't bad, but I've also got a logitech keyboard with some extra keys which I've assigned to one of them the above command sequence. Works well :)

^!A::
Run, mmsys.cpl
WinWait,Sound
ControlSend,SysListView321,{Down 2}
ControlGet, isEnabled, Enabled,,&Set Default
if(!isEnabled)
{
ControlSend,SysListView321,{Down 1}
}
ControlClick,&Set Default
ControlClick,OK
WinWaitClose
SoundPlay, *-1
return

Introduction

This has been so painful.

I've spent hours trying to get this working with little info on google searches for when things have gone wrong.

Fortunately, I have got it working! Hopefully this guide will be of some help if you're trying to get CUPs working on your wireless router.

What is CUPs? printing....from your wireless router???
CUPs is a linux print server. Using a wireless router, such as the TP-LINK WR1043ND, we're able to install a new open source firmware such as OpenWrt. Furthermore we can install different packages, such as CUPs, allowing us to do a lot more than the manufacturer originally intended.

Issues upon issues...

My first attempt at this saw many different issues.  If you really want to see what I was struggling with, I have a forum post about them here: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=39990

A fresh start

It was time I started again from scratch. I decided I would try out a bleeding edge build and I am now running OpenWrt Attitude Adjustment 12.09-beta, LuCI Trunk (trunk+svn9220). My reason for this is the off chance a package I had installed may have been having issues with "stable" which hasn't been updated in almost a year (http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1/ar71xx/ shows Dec 2011).

Equipment

- TP-Link WR1043ND Wireless router
- 10 port powered USB hub (overkill but I got it cheap. The WR1043ND doesn't do a good job providing power to USB devices, so without a powered hub, you may see strange issues, especially with USB 3G modems.)
- 2GB USB stick (This will be used for spooling for CUPs)
- Brother HL5240 Laser Printer
- Canon MX310 Multifunction Printer

Installation

1. Install OpenWRT on your wireless router.

There are enough guides online on this, and I won't cover it here. All I'm going to say is if you're currently running OpenWRT and you want to try another version of it, login to your router via the web, then System > Backup / Flash Firmware > Flash new firmware image.

Normally you would download a sysupgrade .bin but I used a factory.bin. This is because I was going between different versions of OpenWRT and I'm not sure if a sysupgrade version may have caused issues. I also unticked "keep settings" since I wanted it back to default config.

Flash the firmware then re-setup any of your basic config (passwords, ip address, wireless SSID etc).

2. Prepare your router for CUPs

At this point, you've probably already seen the CUPs guide on the OpenWRT site and are probably stuck on it. Hopefully the below steps will be of some help.

For me running ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT (12.09-beta, r33312), all the required usb packages were already installed. You can check what packages are installed by entering opkg list-installed, or via web by going System > Software.

Basically before you install CUPs you need:
kmod-usb-core
kmod-usb-ohci
libusb

I think you may also need kmod-usb2, and hotplug2.  I have them installed anyway.

CUPs also needs:
zlib, libpthread,  libpng, libjpeg, libstdcpp, and if you're using a canon printer, you may need cups-bjnp. Note, for all of the above, except cups-bjnp, they may be dependencies for CUPs and I didn't have to manually install any of them. I have a feeling they all just installed when I installed CUPs.

To install:

opkg update
opkg install kmod-usb-core kmod-usb-ohci libusb kmod-usb2 hotplug2

Make sure you don't have kmod-usb-printer installed or running.
Why? because CUPs talks directly to the printers and kmod-use-printer is another layer which is used by other apps such as p910nd to communicate with the printer. This is also the reason why you won't see lp0 under /dev.

Right! Prerequisites are out of the way, lets actually install CUPs!

3. Installing CUPs

From the command line: opkg install cups

That was probably the easiest step of the lot.

Now that CUPs is installed, there's a bit of config you need to do before it will probably work. As detailed on a forum post on www.newren.com.au, you need to do the following:

Use a text editor (e.g. vi) to open  /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, so:

root@OpenWrt:/# vi /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

change
User Nobody
Group Nobody

to:
User root
Group root

And change AuthClass to AuthClass Anonymous.

Remember to change allowed network to your network,  otherwise you won’t be able to find the printer. E.G: 

 Order Deny,Allow
 Allow From 127.0.0.1
 Allow From 192.168.0.0/24

Change "Allow From 192.168.0.0/24" to the IP subnet you're using.

Use ":wq" to save the file and quit. Personally I prefer using the text editor nano, so I did opkg install nano, and then nano /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, edited the file, then ctrl + x, Y, enter.

Then, you need to change the permissions on /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb to 700.

To do this, enter: chmod 700 /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb

This changes the behavior of cups, which normally tries to execute the backend through a user account other than root. This forces the backend to run as root from cups.

Okay! Got this far? Try entering the following command:

root@OpenWrt:/# /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb

You should hopefully see something like:

DEBUG: list_devices
 DEBUG: usb_find_busses=1
 DEBUG: usb_find_devices=7
 direct usb://Canon/MX310%20series?serial=406F4E&interface=1 "Canon MX310 series" "Canon MX310 series" "MFG:Canon;CMD:BJL,BJRaster3,BSCCe,PLI;SOJ:TXT01;MDL:MX310series;CLS:PRINTER;DES:Canon MX310 series;VER:1.030;STA:10;HRI:EU;MSI:E3;" ""

Yus! This is a good sign! This means that CUPs is talking correctly with your printers. Get an error? I originally had:

root@OpenWrt:/usr/lib/cups/backend# /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb
/usr/lib/cups/backend/usb: can't load library 'libusb-0.1.so.4'

Fix:

root@OpenWrt:/usr/lib# opkg update
 Downloading http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1/ar71xx/packages/Packages.gz.
root@OpenWrt:/usr/lib# opkg install libusb

4. Accessing CUPs

To access cups, enter http://ip-address-of-your-router:631/admin, so for me it's http://192.168.0.1:631/admin

You may be requested to login, just use your root account, unless you've created another account.

Next go Admin > Add Printer, and you should be presented with the following screen:

As you can see, CUPs HAS picked up both my printers correctly, and I'm able to go through each following step in setting them up. What if CUPs doesn't show anything there for you?

Try the following, which was posted on http://9m2tpt.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/cups-hl-2140-usb-printer-wzr-hp-g300nh.html:

To add the printer, just go to http://your-router-ip-address:631. Go to administration, add printer, select the AppSocket/HP JetDirect option. Remember the output from /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb? Use the URI there and paste it into the "Connection" field. Example, for my printer, the URI returned by the backend command is: usb://Brother/HL-2140%20series?serial=F9J555425

Okay! So if your printers DID show up and you didn't have to do the paragraph above, select your printer and click next. There's two ways you can install your printer. You can either install it as RAW, or you can install a PPD file for your printer. Without going into detail, I believe you're better off installing using a ppd file. If my case with the Brother HL5240, I was able to get the ppd file from: http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Brother/Brother-HL-5240

Go through all the steps and you should have your printer sitting as idle under printers. At this point, you should be able to add your printer on a client and try printing a test page.

Note: Due to limited functionality of CUPs on the router, you can't print a test page from within CUPs on the device.

5. Configuring a Windows 7 Client for the CUPs Printer

1. Click Start, and type add a printer.
2. Click add a network, wireless, or Bluetooth printer.
3. Click "The printer  that I want isn't listed."

4. Select the second option, and paste the full URL to the printer. In CUPs, select Printers > followed by the printer itself. The url in your address bar is what you should paste below. Then install the correct drivers for your device. On the last screen you could click "print a test page" followed by finish.

At this point, hopefully a test page has printed. Wohoo!!

I spent hours getting to this point. And it's a fantastic feeling having your wireless router act as a print server. The thing to remember is, it's not over yet....

Configure a USB drive for spooling storage

One issue that we face having a wireless router act as a print server, is that this wasn't its original function, and therefore there are certain constraints that we must get around. 1 is that the router has an extremely small and limited internal memory. With CUPs, when a user sends a job to the printer, the whole file gets transferred across, and needs to be stored, or cached somewhere while the printer gets ready to start printing. Therefore, we need to set up a usb drive for spooling. You may get away with not having to do this step, but you also may have print job issues down the track if you're printing a big file. Chances are you have a spare usb flash drive lying around not being used, so why not just do the extra step.

For this step, there are other guides online for configuring a flash drive for OpenWrt, not to mention the OpenWrt usb storage page. There's quite a good guide on it here. For me though, I have a linux Mint laptop, so I just plugged in my spare usb drive, apt-get installed gparted, and then configured 90% of the flash drive with ext4, and the last 10% as SWAP. I also changed the permissions on the flash drive and used permissions you probably shouldn't use by doing "sudo chmod 777 /mnt/flash drive" which basically gives all users read write and execute permissions. For me I don't think there will be any issues with this.

Following the guides above, I did:

opkg update
opkg install kmod-usb-storage kmod-fs-ext4 block-mount

At this point there is two ways you could mount your storage, either using the CLI/SSH or via the gui web page. Personally doing it with the web page, as I find it easier.

If you don't have the tab "Mount Points" it's probably because you don't have all the right packages installed. It didn't appear for me till I added "block-mount".

Next reboot your router and make sure the usb device comes up mounted correctly on the above page. At this point it may be a good idea just to do a blank page print to your printer to ensure everything is still working fine. Okay next step!

Configure CUPs to use your USB device for print jobs

Time to re-edit your CUPs config. Either use VI or your text editor of choice and edit your cupsd.conf file:

nano /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

Change:

RequestRoot /var/cups
 TempDir /var/cups

I changed both to /usb/cups/ since as you can see in the above screen cap I mounted my usb drive as /usb

You probably should restart CUPs now.Do this by:
root@OpenWrt:~# /etc/init.d/cupsd restart

Also if at some point you've restarted your device and CUPs hasn't started, do either of the following:

enter /etc/init.d/cupsd enable or alternatively in the gui go to System > Started, and make sure cupsd has enabled beside it.

Speaking of cleaning up
Could be a good point to get rid of those default printers you're not using.

Firstly stop the cups service: /etc/init.d/cupsd stop

I just commented out the printers doing nano /etc/cups/printers.conf and putting a # beside them. Syslog will throw up a couple of errors on start up but that shouldn't matter. Alternatively just delete everything for the two defaults.
Then do:
/etc/init.d/cupsd start

Adding the printers on a Mac Client.
I had issues adding the printers through the default mac config, but then suddenly remembered that Macs actually run a local version of CUPs so I just added them by going into the web browser: http://127.0.0.1:631 and adding the printers in there! Works great!

Conclusion

Hopefully you made it this far, and have a working version of CUPs on your wireless router! Congrats!

Got an issue that you've been stuck in for hours?  Always try doing some debug, E.g. via the web interface, go Status > System Log, or Kernel Log. Both of which can be pretty helpful.

As a last resort, if you've really stuffed things up, a fresh install might be the way to go. Fixed things for me!

Got any questions? feel free to write below.

Other Resources

Quite a good guide if you're wanting to use p910nd as your print server:

• http://chee-yang.blogspot.co.nz/2011/11/make-host-based-usb-printer-work-with.html

USB flash drive on OpenWRT 10.03 Backfire HOWTO:

• http://asomewhatintegratedlife.blogspot.co.nz/2010/09/usb-flash-drive-on-openwrt-1003.html

Other CUPs on OpenWrt install guides around the web:

• http://9m2tpt.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/cups-hl-2140-usb-printer-wzr-hp-g300nh.html
• www.newren.com.au/ibbs/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=392

Another all in one guide which covers pretty much everything except a print server:

• http://knowhow.bart.prokop.name/install/openwrt/wr1043nd

For several months now I've had this error, which causes my server to randomly blue screen and restart. I don't typically notice this though, as virtual machines running on top of the server are preset to auto boot once windows has restarted (thanks to VMWare workstation 8 shared VM feature). I've looked at this issue in the passed and presumed it must either be hardware related or a bad install of Windows server 2008 R2 (This also applies to Win 7).

I think I may have just gotten to the cause issue of it. If you've come across this page and you use a DLNA program called Serviio, keep reading, otherwise your issue could be unrelated (although as described below, it was a combination of serviio, java and ffmpeg).

I'd previously looked at the blue screen minidumps using some analyzer which didn't seem to say more than the error was f4 caused by ntoskrnl.exe which didn't leave me with much to try and figure out what really was causing it. A quick google on it will show the number of people having frustrating unexplained issues with it.

Something I should have done ages ago was simply to open the windows Event Viewer. Looking at logs around the time of crashes showed something quite interesting and unexpected:

Faulting application name: ffmpeg.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4ee7d185
Faulting module name: ffmpeg.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4ee7d185
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0071e4e3
Faulting process id: 0x10f0
Faulting application start time: 0x01cd8d892d613b00
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\ffmpeg.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\ffmpeg.exe
Report Id: 6c28bf8e-f97c-11e1-8d1f-940c6d82d8ea

A bit more googling on this, and hopefully I have a fix for the crashing. Time will tell, as the blue screen restarts are quite random (might go a day without it, or a week) and often when the server is idle and not having any major resources accessed.

Hopeful fix:

Installed latest Serviio (1.01)

Downloaded and installed offline version of Java x64 (forum suggestion) - uninstall any previous versions of Java you have installed first.

Manually downloaded latest ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/) and put in it C:\Program Files\Serviio\lib\

Update:

Well it's only been a day since I wrote this post, but a bit more research into this has shown that for me at least, it is somehow Serviio related. Thanks to a brilliant forum post I found while trying to find a better BSoD dump analyser, I discovered http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=analyze. This website allows you to upload your BSoD minidump and will analyze it for you! Brilliant!

Example of one of my Minidumps here.

Update #2:

A month 1/2 now and no bluescreens! Issue for me = closed!