add AirPrint to a Brother MFC-7360N

With all the recent corona changes, we are in need of a home printer. Of course, b/w laser is the way to go, cheap inkjet printers are a scam and tend to break right after the warranty period. So I decided to buy a 4-in-1 Brother MFP, the MFC-7360N. It can print, scan, copy and fax and I got it from eBay kleinanzeigen for 20.- € with an empty toner cartridge.

I am really happy with this machine and can recommend it to anyone, 3rd party toners are very affordable (around 12.- €) and last for thousands of pages.

I also like to print scanned developed analog b/w photos with it as they look like photocopies, but that is a matter of taste I guess.

So the machine works well and performs great, and there is an iOS app for it which allows you to scan to your phone. You can also print with this app but I was looking for AirPrint support to integrate directly with iOS devices on the same network. The printer does not feature this relatively new protocol but if you have a linux machine on the network, maybe a raspberry pi, install CUPS properly and use the brlaser v4 ppd with it by Peter De Wachter, thanks! Presto, there’s your AirPrint, works like a charm.

Another reason I recommend Brother is that there is an undocumented “toner empty”-reset command which will just let you print along until the toner is physically used up:

found in a german video review by VideoP, thanks.

So it turns out that the toner cartridge I got with the printer is far from empty and the Brother continues to print just fine :)