ecoPrinter Automatically Sends PDF Prints From Your Computer to Your Android Smartphone

Despite the best efforts of the technology industry, printing physical documents still seems to be necessary. Some organizations even still require that you fax in documents, but I digress. Fortunately, you can probably get away with keeping PDFs on your phone in many cases. It can just be a bit of pain to get those PDF files from your computer to your phone. ecoPrinter is a “no interaction” file transfer device that can automatically send PDF files from your computer to your Android smartphone to make the process easier than ever.

The ecoPrinter device relies on the Android Beam file transfer tool to get the PDF “prints” to your smartphone. Android Beam is mostly intended for transferring files between Android smartphones, but also works for this purpose. NFC is used to initiate the file transfer, and the actual transfer is handled via a Bluetooth connection. That’s handy because it keeps you from having to manually connect to the device to send a file. In the case of the ecoPrinter, that makes it easy and convenient to transfer the PDF. You just have to place your Android smartphone on the device and the PDF will automatically be transferred.

That functionality is made possible thanks to a Raspberry Pi Zero W. When connected to a computer via USB, it shows up as a printer. Any kind of print job can be sent to that “printer” as a PDF file, just like if you were saving it to your desktop. The Raspberry Pi receives the PDF file, and prepares it to be sent to any smartphone through Android Beam. It can retain that file until a new one is “printed,” so that many people can scan their phone to receive the PDF. Because of that, the ecoPrinter would be ideal for conferences and other events where you may want to hand out information to a lot of people without wasting any paper.