I do actually use Node-RED myself for my zigbee home automation. Funny how it never crossed my mind to pick it up for this. It's perfect as I want a non-programmer to be able to maintain it.
I doubt my solution will be much more than ingest and print, but I'll report back. Still fighting to get that hp p3015 to do something over IPP...
Now this is an idea I like. Thank you so much, I never would have considered Node-RED for this application!
Thank you for the suggestion. Not exactly what I'm looking for, sadly.
Gotcha. Thanks anyway. 🙂
You're right about printing not being all that, but certain situations (my situation) call for it, at least for the time being.
This is for manufacturing orders in a low tech environment, and at this point in time I need to stick with a paper trail (so I can get rid of it in the future.)
Thanks for the reply. I don't think I fully understand what you mean.
What I would like to have is a service running on a server, fetching and printing mails. Could you please elaborate how your idea would work?
Thanks for the idea. It's not quite what I was looking for, but I might look into it more if I don't find anything better.
From the looks of it, it requires python scripting anyway, so there isn't a big advantage to fetching the mail with python and imaplib directly.
The killer feature for me is my networked scanner scanning directly to the paperless consume samba share and the documents just popping up in the inbox fully OCRd and pre-categorised. Pretty magical.
NB, the docs make it sound like a proper DB is optional, but it's really not. Performance was iffy for me with sqlite but is rock solid with Postgres.
I have been researching the same question a few days ago and am currently running
> badblocks -b 4096 -c 8 -svw /dev/sda
on my old NAS drive. It makes a few passes writing the disk full of 0xaa and 0x55 and then reading it back.
I have my disk in a USB2.0 SATA adapter on a raspberry pi 3 and it's currently at 70% of pass #2 after 100 hours, so it sure is slow, but I don't mind.
Snapcast works incredibly well for multi-device audio.
Has anyone tried setting up multiple zones with it that can play different things at the same time? I imagine you would need one snapcast server per zone? And is there an easy way to assign the clients to one of the servers?
One deep dive into the IPP protocol, printer drivers, and specific supported formats ("what the hell is an octet-stream?!") later, I have something functional.
I'm not a JS guy, so I don't know if it's a very node-y way to do it. But except for the pages coming out a little scaled this works:
Edit to briefly explain what this does: The mail node ingests unread emails and passes them forward to a function node that checks for pdf attachments. Those are passed forward one by one to a function node that takes care of converting the pdf to pcl (my printer supposedly knows how to handle pdf 1.7 but doesn't, so I had to resort to this) and passes it to the IPP node as a data buffer .
spoiler
[ { "id": "86082bed0ed29155", "type": "IPPrint", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "Print to Network", "IP": "10.10.0.19:631/ipp/print", "JOB_name": "default_job_name", "authuser": "", "authpassword": "", "authcheck": "", "x": 780, "y": 120, "wires": [ [ "b1a8b92ede8a78a5" ] ] }, { "id": "b1a8b92ede8a78a5", "type": "debug", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "debug 1", "active": true, "tosidebar": true, "console": false, "tostatus": false, "complete": "true", "targetType": "full", "statusVal": "", "statusType": "auto", "x": 960, "y": 120, "wires": [] }, { "id": "1fb7fc3843af8e05", "type": "function", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "Convert PDF to PCL", "func": "const baseOptions = {\n width: 2480,\n height: 3508,\n density: 300,\n preserveAspectRatio: true,\n format: 'PCL'\n};\n\n// prepare conversion function\nconst convert = await pdf2pic.fromBuffer(msg.payload, baseOptions);\n// set additional conversion options\nconvert.setGM\n// bulk convert the whole input buffer to a pcl output buffer\nconvert.bulk(-1, {responseType: \"buffer\"}).then((outputs)=>{\n // pass each page on to the printer\n outputs.forEach((output, index) => {\n msg.payload = output.buffer;\n if(msg.topic){\n let jobname = msg.topic\n }\n msg.JOBName = (msg.topic ? msg.topic : \"Mailjob\").concat(\" \", index+1, \"/\", outputs.length);\n msg.docFormat = \"application/octet-stream\";\n node.send(msg);\n });\n});\n", "outputs": 1, "timeout": 0, "noerr": 0, "initialize": "", "finalize": "", "libs": [ { "var": "pdf2pic", "module": "pdf2pic" } ], "x": 560, "y": 120, "wires": [ [ "86082bed0ed29155" ] ] }, { "id": "224317e794da3cb5", "type": "e-mail in", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "Mail ingest", "protocol": "IMAP", "server": "test.mail.com", "useSSL": false, "autotls": "always", "port": "143", "authtype": "BASIC", "saslformat": true, "token": "oauth2Response.access_token", "box": "INBOX", "disposition": "Read", "criteria": "UNSEEN", "repeat": "300", "fetch": "auto", "inputs": 0, "x": 160, "y": 80, "wires": [ [ "2fedaa18c9394b89" ] ] }, { "id": "2fedaa18c9394b89", "type": "function", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "PDF Filter", "func": "if(msg.attachments.length > 0){\n msg.attachments.forEach(function(attachment) {\n if(attachment.contentType == \"application/pdf\"){\n var newmsg = {};\n newmsg.topic = msg.topic;\n newmsg.filename = attachment.filename;\n newmsg.payload = attachment.content;\n node.send(newmsg);\n }\n });\n}", "outputs": 1, "timeout": 0, "noerr": 0, "initialize": "", "finalize": "", "libs": [], "x": 360, "y": 80, "wires": [ [ "1fb7fc3843af8e05" ] ] }, { "id": "3d8f7ad8e6b56d46", "type": "inject", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "Test print", "props": [ { "p": "payload" }, { "p": "topic", "vt": "str" } ], "repeat": "", "crontab": "", "once": false, "onceDelay": 0.1, "topic": "", "payload": "", "payloadType": "date", "x": 160, "y": 160, "wires": [ [ "683ed6fe7c10540d" ] ] }, { "id": "683ed6fe7c10540d", "type": "file in", "z": "08cc7c15668f2f65", "name": "", "filename": "/data/2517.pdf", "filenameType": "str", "format": "", "chunk": false, "sendError": false, "encoding": "none", "allProps": false, "x": 340, "y": 160, "wires": [ [ "1fb7fc3843af8e05" ] ] } ]