I had a problem. I needed to measure the print spooler speed when printing to a remote location. My tests required that I be able to send actual documents from a Windows desktop to a printer in the remote office, and see how long it takes to spool.

My first idea was to get a cheap printer and locate it in the remote location. But, after doing some quick calculations, I would kill the printer by printing a page every 5 minutes for a year. Esp since I had nearly zero budget. The consumables (paper, toner/ink) would have made the costs prohibitive. I looked into using a dot matrix printer w/o a ribbon – but still, that is a lot of moving pieces subject to jams and breaks.

I needed a device that would appear as a standalone printer (no printing to files – long reason, not important to this discussion) that would not produce any physical output.

My solution? The Null Printer.

See the build page!