Figure out system for tracking printing by member

Printing has become a significant expense and we need to have some way to manage printing and costs/fees better.

 

An ideal system would be a printer server that only releases the print job when someone scans their RFID card. It would log that card serial number and print job details to be audited later. Perhaps a raspberry pi running a CUPS print server would be a good start. The trick would be to setup a conditional release of the print job till the user had entered name (or swiped rfid card). Even better if it can calculate an amount based on pages and color/black and white. That amount could easily generate a paypal payment link.

 

Alternatively we might be able to implement print logging using something like: https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/print-logger/ but would likely need to figure out how to create a named user account for each member (automatic or self registration). 

 

I did research on Papercut which has a "release station" option where you print to it and then release it. But the software is $500 and to add paypal is another $500.

 

An open source alternative seems to be:https://www.savapage.org/

It looks like users can be created on the fly even by Oath, this would be sufficent to capture member names for billing.

https://www.savapage.org/docs/manual/ch-webapp-user-login-alternatives.html

 

Also seems to have ablity to charge directly with Paypal.

https://www.savapage.org/docs/manual/app-plugin.html#app-plugin-payment-...

 

 

 

Other ideas and solutions welcome.

Priority: 
1 - High
Frequency: 
Once

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