AirWriter v0.2.0

This is the first release with colour. Put Apple's colour ribbon in and the ImageWriter II prints colour pages from an iPhone or a Mac, one pass per ink, yellow, magenta, cyan and black. The board asks the printer which ribbon it has and tells your devices, so a colour ribbon shows up as a colour printer and a black one as black and white, with no re-adding. On a black ribbon colour pages print in gray, as before.

The halftone got better underneath. The Atkinson and Floyd-Steinberg screens scan back and forth so their diagonal worms are gone, the four colour inks keep off each other's dots instead of piling up at random, and there is a new blue noise screen to try. A halftone you tap on the settings page is used from the next print; it no longer waits for a restart. The preview under the tabs now shows the page the way it prints, as ink on paper, in colour when the colour ribbon is in, and the page names the ribbon under the AirWriter name.

The light panel answers everything you do now: a firmware update, a reset countdown, a cable test, the LocalTalk chip being flashed, a page coming out, a cancelled job, a Wi-Fi join that failed. A normal power-on is quiet, just the spin until Wi-Fi and the printer have settled. After five minutes idle one dot breathes, the way an old PowerBook's sleep light did. The boot spin no longer stutters while Wi-Fi joins.

Macs show Apple's own ImageWriter icon for the printer when you add it. The cable test tells an empty LocalTalk chip socket apart from a bad cable, and answers on the strip of lights between the two sockets.

There is a known-good slot now: the board keeps the last firmware that finished a real print, and holding the test button through power-up boots it, whatever a later update did. Taking this release over the air from v0.1.1 works and everything above runs, but the slot itself needs the new partition table, and that only comes with a one-time flash over USB (idf.py flash from the firmware folder; your Wi-Fi and settings survive it). Until then the power-up reset keeps doing what it did on v0.1.1.

Only firmware signed with my key installs, over the air or from the settings page, same as v0.1.1. The ESP32-C6 devkit build is gone; the board is the ESP32-S3.

AirWriter v0.1.1

A documentation update over v0.1.0, published to test automatic updates. If your AirWriter runs v0.1.0 with auto on, it installs this by itself.

AirWriter v0.1.0

The first signed release. From here on an AirWriter only installs firmware signed with the AirWriter release key, from this page or from its own settings page.

Install it over the air by uploading airwriter-esp32s3.bin on the settings page (update firmware). After that, the settings page can find and install new releases itself.