Learn Coding for Brother Printers

Eligibility
This Contest is open ONLY to legal residents who are physically located in the United States.

Introduction

Despite all predictions, the paper has not gone away. We continue to use paper in many forms: birth certificates, immunization records, loan applications, and more. How can we intelligently manage the paper documents we must have? Begin with digitization, scanning, and converting paper into digital form, a common first step in document management and workflow systems.

The Brother Solutions Interface (BSI) is the on-ramp to document management and workflow systems. BSI gives developers wide-ranging control over Brother all-in-one printers’ touchscreen input/output and advanced scan, copy, print, email, fax, and security capabilities. Through BSI, you control your Brother all-in-one printer by sending and receiving commands and responses packaged as XML documents.

Selecting Five Finalist Teams

From all proposal submissions, ten teams will be shortlisted for the project building phase. Of those ten teams, five will be invited to participate based on the team's proactive engagement with Brother USA. All submissions should be custom to the event and problem statements. Please follow all directions for submission and project guidelines. Non-custom submissions will be disqualified.

Each team selected as a finalist will be provided a refurbished Brother MFC-L5700DW, a monochrome laser all-in-one printer (print, copy, scan, and fax) with a touchscreen display.

Information Sessions and Training

All interested hackers will be introduced to the concepts behind the Brother Solutions Interface during two live “Ask Me Anything” Zoom sessions. The five finalist teams will receive in-depth Brother Solutions Interface training, also during live Zoom sessions. All Zoom sessions will be recorded and posted online. “Ask Me Anything” sessions will be posted to this HackerEarth site. The in-depth training sessions, available to the five finalist teams, will be posted to the Brother Developers site.

Participants’ Skills (Who should participate)

To be a strong participant, developers should have experience in …

• Writing Web applications
• Managing a simple HTTP server
• Strong programming skills, the language of your choice, in Web app backend development, e.g., JavaScript, Node.js, or Python
• Writing XML documents, understanding XML schema (XSD)
• Using an all-in-one printer (optional)

Legal Stuff

All team submissions, the idea, and the project, will remain the intellectual property (IP) of the team. Brother International, at its discretion, will help promote a winning team’s idea or project. The Brother Solutions Interface, its documentation, and supporting programs are proprietary to Brother Industries Ltd. Each developer, when registering for this hackathon, will be required to have read and agree to the terms of the Hackathon Terms and Conditions, Non-Disclosure Agreement and the Developer License Agreement in order to participate.

The Problem Statement & What We Expect

In this hackathon, you will learn how to program a Brother all-in-one printer using BSI. After learning BSI, you will have two required challenges.

1. Integrate BSI into a document workflow
You can improve the document workflow for the car buying process at the fictional Brother Motors car dealership OR provide your own scenario for a document workflow. We are not asking you to code a document workflow – we are asking you to code the BSI implemented portions of the workflow.

The Brother Motors car buying process is described in the Resource Center section.

2. Create a dashboard for a printer administrator
What would you include in a printer administrator’s dashboard? Perhaps advance notification for when toner, drums, and belts need to be replaced. And how many pages have been printed, copies made, and documents scanned? 

BSI’s ReadDb command directly accesses, without SNMP, the all-in-one printer’s public MIB and Brother’s proprietary MIB. BSI Log events provide statistics on the all-in-one printer’s activities. BSI’s Heartbeat function can automatically schedule a BSI solution to run periodically.  Combine ReadDb, Log events, and Heartbeat to create dashboards, alerts, etc. for the printer administrator.

At a minimum, your document workflow and dashboard should make use of the required BSI features described in the Judging Criteria section's table "Development Phase 2 -- BSI Required and Optional Features."

Brother Motors Car Buying Process Sample Workflow

The scenario: The buyer visits Brother Motors to buy a car from the salesperson, who uses the all-in-one printer to improve a document workflow for the car buying process. This is a simplified version of the car buying process.

The characters:

Note: Give these roles or characters any names you want.

The workflow:

This workflow is very basic. 

• Buyer walks into Brother Motors and is greeted by the salesperson.
• Buyer gives the salesperson their first name, last name, and phone number.
• Salesperson enters this information into the all-in-one-printer.
• Buyer gives the salesperson their driver’s license, utility bill, and pay stub.
• Salesperson scans these documents (see below, “The documents”).
• Salesperson gives buyer a personalized bill of sale (see below, “The documents”).
• Buyer signs the bill of sale.
• Salesperson scans the bill of sale.

The documents:

Note: Scan these documents, one set for each of the two buyers, for later retrieval.

The data:

Using the all-in-one printer’s touchscreen, for each buyer, input the following information for later use in the bill of sale:  first name, last name, and phone number.

Table: Development Phase 2 -- BSI Required and Optional Features